Mélenchon vs. Hollande

The 6th of November 2008 was a decisive day in the recent history of the French left. Segolene Royal’s line won the most votes at the Socialist Party (PS) congress at Reims, but failed to earn a majority. Royal spoke a language of novelty, renewal, modernity, and modernisation: the left needed to accept globalisation while trying to change it. They needed to embrace Europe and develop a modern socialism fit for the era after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The line Royal supported, motion E or “Hope on the Left, Proud to be Socialist”, made nods to the antiglobalisation movement of the late 90s and early 2000s with its references to decentralised networks and the urgency of the ecological crisis, but ultimately the proposal was to “regulate and master contemporary capitalism”. Although the text of motion E sometimes dipped into the vocabulary of radicalism, at other points it promised vague and ominous fixes such as a pledge to “reform the welfare system without taboo in order to save it”. It was essentially a document penned by a left in crisis that had decided that accommodation with globalisation and implicitly neoliberalism was how progressive forces needed to respond to the new world.

Royal became a bit player in the history of what followed. Although the line she supported came in first at the congress, she narrowly lost out on becoming first secretary of the party. She had hoped to “build upon the dynamic” that she felt she had established in her failed presidential campaign the year before, but it was not to be. Other members of the party took umbrage at what they saw as her attempts to turn the PS into her own personal fan club, and at her hints at the possibility of a coalition with the centrist party MoDem, led by François Bayrou (who would go on to be Prime Minister under Macron). In fact, proponents of two of the losing lines at the congress would prove far more consequential.

Motion A—“Clarity, Courage and Creativity”—was supported by heavyweights of the PS’ Europhile “second left”, such as former prime ministers Jacques Delors and Michel Rocard, as well as the incumbent first secretary François Hollande. Although Hollande and co supported motion A rather than Royal’s motion E, in reality there was not much to distinguish them. Supporters of both figures had urged a unity ticket that could achieve a majority in the runup to the congress.

Royal’s motion E coming in first but failing to achieve a majority proved historic for two reasons. Firstly, it cleared the way for Hollande to realise his ambitions and become the PS candidate for president in 2012. Motion E’s failure to win a majority eventually marginalised Royal and her politics of personality which had stood in his way. Secondly, it signalled to the left of the PS that they no longer had a place in the party and that it was time to pack their bags and leave.

The left’s line, in support of installing Benoit Hamon as first secretary, achieved just 19% within the party. Motion C which laid out their vision was titled “A World Ahead, Rebuilding Hope on the Left”. But if there was hope to be found on the left, key players on the PS’ radical fringe no longer believed it could be built within the party.

Hollande and Melenchon’s political manoeuvres were just the latest iteration of a political duel over the soul of the French left that by then had been ongoing for 13 years and which by 2025 has become a 30 years’ war showing no signs of cooling down.

The two giants of left of centre politics do have at least one thing in common. Until very recently it had looked like they were both in retirement, Hollande after his one term presidency ended in ignominy, Mélenchon after his third presidential bid failed, yet both have returned to the heart of left-wing politics. Mélenchon is now eyeing a fourth run at the presidency, and Hollande having secured himself a seat in the 2024 legislative election is leveraging his new role and his weight as an elder statesman to influence the internal politics of the PS and the wider left.

When the two men faced off against each other in the election for the party’s general secretary in 1997—in which Hollande won a resounding victory—Mélenchon insisted that it was “not a matter of personality, it [was] a matter of ideas”, though the vitriol with which they attack each other suggests that it might be both. This battle of ideas is evident in the most recent books of the two politicians, with each man laying out their theory of left politics and rejecting the theory of the other.

Hollande’s book, Le Defi de Gouverner (“The Challenge of Governing”) was published in French in September 2024.^[1] The book presents a history of the left and its relationship to power—by which he means state power—from the Dreyfus Affair to the present day.

Hollande impresses upon his readers that the left can make substantial progress towards equality and democracy while in power, but that left wing voters must temper their expectations and not hope for anything too radical. Eventually, he argues, left governments will come up against the seemingly insurmountable mur d’argent or “wall of money”. It was this wall of money which, in 1925, prevented Edouard Herriot, the PM from the Radical Party, and the Cartel of the Left, a governmental alliance of the centre-left Radical Party and the French Section of the Workers International, from pursuing their policies amid an ongoing monetary crisis that they inherited from the previous centre-right government. Hollande writes that the cartel “defended the franc until they asphyxiated themselves, but were still accused of burying it”. There might be a lesson to draw here for the centre left, that the wall of money is not necessarily the objective financial situation, but that situation combined with the political hostility of capital which can exercise veto power against governments of the left: but Hollande does not take this lesson. Of Herriot he writes simply that “you cannot do politics against the economy”.

Both books are works of pedagogy aiming to educate a younger left. Mélenchon’s is titled Faites Mieux (“Do Better”), a letter to young militants aiming to explain his thought. This book has been rebranded as a general theory for the English publication titled Now the People! Revolution in the 21st Century.^[2]

Hollande’s pedagogical impulse is to reign in the radical excesses of France’s left-voting youth (a significant portion of the wider youth support Le Pen) who vote overwhelmingly for the France Unbowed (La France Insoumise), and to add in a dose of what he considers political realism. He marshals the experiences of the left in government to suggest that the weight of this history boxes the left in, leaving a severely restricted set of options. He writes that “the invocation of “inheritance” would often return in the later explanations of the left, with François Mitterrand as with myself, to justify the difficulties encountered at the beginning of the mandate”.

But it is not just the inheritance left behind after one or other presidency that Hollande implies constrains the left, but history itself. The Marxism of Jean Jaurès, for example, is attributed to the revolutionary conditions of the time: conditions which Hollande argues are long irrelevant. From the very first page, Hollande draws a distinction between a pragmatic left and a left of naïve revolutionaries. Jaurès manages to be both because he kept his “revolutionary perspective, at least in theory” but managed to show that socialists “knew how to protect the institutions” and ensure the stability of government. The protection of institutions is a recurring theme. Hollande consistently takes not just the perspective of someone seeking state power, but the perspective of the state itself.

Mélenchon’s Jaurès, by contrast, is the Jaurès who cried that “Political democracy is expressed in a central idea, or better still in a single idea: the political sovereignty of the people”. This highlights one of the main political and strategic differences between the two men: where Hollande identifies himself with the state, Mélenchon identifies himself with the people— the mass of humanity organised as a collective actor.

In one of many anecdotes from his life that pepper the book, Mélenchon is pleased when a fellow passenger on the metro expresses surprise that the politician he has seen on TV uses public transport “just like the rest of us”. He writes “I identify with the powerful statement that Maximilien Robespierre made to the Jacobin Club on 2 January 1792: ‘I am of the people, I have never been anything but that, I want to be nothing but that; I despise anyone who purports to be something more.’”

Here we find another difference between the two men and the tendencies they represent. Hollande represents the left of government and state administration. For him, the useful history that can be drawn on ends at the Dreyfus Affair. In his telling, the left never achieves anything when outside the state and as such 1968 and the social demands it unleashed, the defence of the pension age by unions in 1995, and even the Communist resistance to Nazi occupation receive no treatment.

Mélenchon’s historical lineage extends back much further to the French revolution itself, and occasionally to the class struggle in Ancient Rome. The first page of Now the People! invokes the French Revolution as the birth of the modern era and notes that “today again France is seeing eruptions that the world looks at with amazement”. Hollande writes of the Left, Mélenchon of the People. As he told the Telegraph in a recent interview “I’m not a Leftist. I’m a Republican through and through—as was Jean Jaurès, founder of French socialism.”

History serves an opposite purpose in the hands of Mélenchon than in the hands of Hollande. Mélenchon analyses the accumulation of the population in cities, the development over time of networks that mediate and support urban life—such as the ability to draw water from a tap and buy food from a shop, without having to dig a well or harvest crops directly yourself—and poses the possibility of a dialectical resolution to the crisis of capitalism.

Mélenchon suggests that the central conflict of the age is between the people and the oligarchy: of which he argues Hollande and Macron are functionaries.

The oligarchy benefits from an economic system whose rhythms are out of step with the rhythms of human flourishing: sugar consumption has soared, sleeping patterns have been disrupted, humanity’s ecosystem has been thrown into chaos, and “inequality, poverty and hunger have once again become mass problems, even where they had previously been eradicated”. The oligarchs are, according to Mélenchon, the “clock masters” of the era, controlling the rhythms to which all human life is subordinated.

Hollande understands the power of the oligarchy as an insurmountable, almost natural obstacle in the “wall of money” blocking the path of progress through the veto power of finance, an analysis that would incidentally let him off the hook for the failure of his government. Mélenchon argues that the system over which the oligarchs have presided, of mass urbanisation, the coming together of people in transport networks and other networks of life support has, in the emergence of a “single human people”, produced the political actor that will be the gravedigger of that system. Analysis of history and of contemporary conditions, in the hands of Mélenchon is a chisel with which to break the possibilities of the future open, rather than to close them down.

The intervening period between the Reims Congress and today saw Hollande and Mélenchon face off as candidates in the first round of the presidential election of 2012. Mélenchon outperformed expectations with his sovereigntist, republican left line that earned him 11% of the vote. In the Challenge of Governing, Hollande modestly attributes his victory to the tactical vote, though by the point that he is considering his own presidency, the point by which the book moves from pointed historical analysis to self-exculpating memoir, he has already spent several chapters reinforcing his belief that the left can only win in France when it is unified behind the moderate, rather than the radical faction.

Hollande’s presidential term was characterised largely by failure—-even on his own terms—though he strenuously denies this. To his credit, he passed a major progressive social reform in the legalisation of gay marriage and did so in the face of an aggressive backlash from Catholic reactionaries. His mandate was also wracked by several brutal jihadist attacks, but his presidency laid bare the consequences of the centre-left’s twin accommodations with neoliberalism and the reactionary right’s politics of fear. Even if, as he claims, it was a mistake of the radical left to conflate his “targeting of finance with capitalism in its entirety” Hollande did not seriously challenge the power of finance capital, doing little to rebalance power within the economy. He derides the left’s hatred of business, but it was he that oversaw the closure of steelworks—-against which the left protested. He promised that finance would be his enemy, but accepted the sado-monetarist diktats coming from the EU in Brussels and European Central Bank in Frankfurt, rather than challenging the suicidal austerity policies that Europe pursued. As Paul Krugman wrote, Hollande “coulda been a contender”, but “instead he promptly folded, giving in completely to demands for even more austerity”.^[3] Thirteen years on and Hollande’s handling of the euro crisis is perhaps the clearest evidence that the “wall of money” is the post hoc rationalisation of a leftist who caved, or of a centrist who wasn’t all that left-wing to begin with, rather than an omnipotent force. Hollande writes of his speech attacking finance that he “takes back nothing I said that day nor anything I did over the next five years”.

Every regime is defined by what succeeds it; Hollande promoted Macron, allowing him to accrue power within the PS and then usurp it. Hollande’s state of emergency imposed after Bataclan and the increase in police militarisation became key features of the repression of the Macron term. Hollande also left the labour movement in a weaker state than when he took office thanks to the El Khomri law which increased the power of employers relative to unions and individual workers. Despite the fact that even the CFDT, the most conciliatory union, whose proposals informed parts of the policy, came out into the street to demand a rebalancing of the law (other unions demanded its total repeal), Hollande insists in the Challenge of Governing that the twin aspirations to protect workers and to make the labour market much more flexible for employers were compatible.

It would be tempting for some to view the conflict between Hollande and Mélenchon as a reiteration of the reform vs. revolution debate but that debate is more pertinent to the disagreement between the Unbowed and a group like Permanent Revolution which characterises the Unbowed’s theory of achieving state power through an election and implementing a post-Keynesian program and Constituent Assembly as reformist. Hollande’s theory of accommodation with history, making minor changes within the conditions strictly delineated by finance, big business, the EU, and NATO amounts to a slowing of the pace of the rightward drift, without doing anything about the general direction of travel. His disagreement with Mélenchon is about whether meaningful structural reform itself is even possible, and on which side of the class struggle should the electoral left stand when it breaks out. This disagreement stems largely from Hollande’s reliance on bourgeois votes as the route to power, in contrast to Mélenchon’s pursuit of votes among the popular classes.

The twin questions of how to assemble an electoral majority and how to approach street protest and strike action demonstrate the irreconcilable cleavages between France’s two lefts and pose difficult questions for Mélenchon. Hollande repeatedly glosses over the achievements of the labour movement. The general strike that facilitated the government’s reforms is acknowledged briefly as a “spontaneous movement” but its role in the 1936 Matignon accords which introduced the 40-hour working week and a series of pro-labour reforms is barely touched on, with Hollande preferring instead to focus on the internal wrangling of the government.

A particularly revealing passage appears in the section on the Liberation of France after the Second World War. Hollande suggests that the actions of Jules Moch, the interior minister that brutally put down strikes in 1947-1948 resulting in six dead workers and 3000 jailed or sacked for having gone on strike, reveals the difficulty the left has in establishing order—and when necessary exercising repression—because the left might be “accused of laxism and weakness” or “denounced as complicit in the established order”. Hollande sympathises with Moch because he believes that during his own presidency he too had to deal with “violent movements that could have taken on uncontrollable form”. Here is perhaps the clearest illustration of Hollande’s identification with the state as such, that dead striking workers are acceptable collateral for the maintenance of order in the eyes of an establishment that might deem you too lax. Though perhaps this identification is unsurprising, protests and strikes against the El Khomri law were met with flashballs —rubber bullets that have subsequently been used to blind protesters and leave them with brain damage—-water cannons, and teargas.

Mélenchon takes the opposite position in his championing of the Citizens’ Revolution, a process in which the People constitutes itself in a long-running battle to achieve democracy and throw out the oligarchy, which he argues in France began with the Yellow Vests (Gilets Jaunes). He denounces the mutilation of protesters developing into a “fully fledged tactic for intimidating opposition” and affirms the revolutionary potential of movements with a quasi-insurrectional character such as the Nahel riots and the battles over mega-basins in which cops engaged in brutal repression of the Earth Uprisings (Soulèvements de la Terre) militants who, in turn, deployed sabotage tactics.

In 2023 when the battle of Sainte-Soline left two Earth Uprisings activists in a coma, the interior minister Gerald Darminan moved to outlaw the Earth Uprisings movement. The response from the Unbowed was to declare themselves, Spartacus-like, part of the Earth Uprisings. As a member of the movement who was at Sainte-Soline put it to me gratefully, “it is hard to criminalise Jean-Luc Mélenchon”. The Unbowed clearly have an ability to act tactically to defend these movements, but the movements that form part of the Citizens’ Revolution sometimes contradict each other in their demands and it is not always clear if the broader strategy of the Unbowed in shaping and generalising the revolt can accommodate them all at once.

Mélenchon argues that the Yellow Vests movement instigated the process of Citizen’s Revolution in France. He lauds the spontaneous emergence of the movement’s citizens assemblies as evidence of “political maturity”, and argues that the Yellow Vests organised themselves into a kind of counter-society through their mutual-aid networks, raucous parties, and democratic assemblies. He sums up his understanding of the protests pithily in a three-word historical lineage “Sans-culottes, Soviets, Roundabouts”.

His admiration and enthusiasm for the protests is palpable, but despite considerable affinity between Mélenchon’s republicanism and the ideology of the Yellow Vests, neither he nor his party have managed to integrate them fully into the movements’ structures or electoral base. The Unbowed struggle in many of the areas that produced the Yellow Vests. The movement makes successful use of its tribune politicians, Rachel Keke (while she held her seat) a cleaner who led a hotel strike; Raphael Arnault, an antifa leader; and Sebastian Delogu, a cabbie who led striking drivers: but there has been not yet been a Yellow Vest deputy. The closest the party has is Mathilde Hignet, a former peasant labourer, but she is not particularly visible at the national level.

This is partly a structural issue where the Unbowed and the French left more broadly are strong in urban areas, but weaker in rural and suburban ones. There is not a magic solution to sprouting where you aren’t actually rooted, and it would be difficult to overturn the sentiment of decades of betrayal by the left, constant media propaganda, and the far right entrenching itself, in one or two electoral cycles. But one gets the sense that there is still more that Mélenchon and the party could do. I asked Vanessa Langard, a Yellow Vest from suburban Paris who was blinded in one eye by a flashball if she had voted at the last election. She had, for Mélenchon, but when I asked her if she felt she had allies in parliament she said that while she would carry on voting for Mélenchon, she felt that she and other wounded Yellow Vests had been abandoned.

Langard is a typical Yellow Vest in her sociological profile. If even the left-leaning and suburban Yellow Vests feel estranged from the Unbowed, it points to a tension between Mélenchon’s theory as laid out in Now the People! and the implementation of the theory in practice by the Unbowed. The 2026 municipal elections will demonstrate whether the party can entrench their “gaseous network” rendering it a more concrete formation rooted in local government which aims to build the “communalist step of the Citizens’ Revolution” .

The fact that no left movement in the West has yet managed to thread the needle between its urban electorate of the racialised working class and downwardly mobile students, and the white working class in peri-urban areas suggests that either there is a structural barrier to uniting these groups, or that the left’s practise is insufficient. No one, inside the France Unbowed or outside it, has yet found a strategy that works in practise for uniting “les bourgs et les tours” – the market towns and the tower blocks. If you talk to Unbowed deputies, they will correctly point out that many of the issues facing these areas are very similar and that there is a thread of class interest that unites them both. Though, the fact remains that the left can sell this message much more easily to the towers where they are present, but less so to the towns where more often than not, they aren’t.

The question of the electoral majority is also in tension in The Challenge of Governing. Hollande uses the experience of the election of François Mitterrand to argue that the left cannot win if the radical force in the driving seat. He quotes Guy Mollet, a Socialist politician who supported the coalition assembled by Mitterrand, who said “It was again he who made the most realistic speech, summing up the situation thus “The left needs the support of the Communist Party to beat the right, but a left dominated by the Communist Party has no chance of coming to power”. He reiterates this at the end of the book arguing that only the PS—or “French socialism” in which he includes the shape-shifting micro party Public Square (Place Publique)—has the perspective needed to tackle the ecological crisis and renew democracy, social cohesion and European engagement.

There is a contradiction at the heart of what Hollande says about the way left electoral majorities are formed, what he says about Mitterrand and how he characterises the Unbowed. He argues, accurately enough, that Mitterrand made the choice to abandon the anti-capitalist and statist parts of his programme during his turn toward austerity, prioritising instead European integration. In Hollande’s eyes this was Mitterrand taking a responsible decision out of the “intuition that Europe was at stake. He wanted the Socialists to play their part in it”. One can argue about the merits of the turn, but it certainly was not born out of the long-term thinking that he accuses the France Unbowed of lacking.

He characterises the Unbowed as preoccupied with the same naïve belief in the “rupture” that Mitterrand held before his turn toward austerity, arguing that their politics is premised on the left holding power only for a short period in which a series of rapid and radical reforms are passed, of a break with neoliberalism that seeds the ground for a further anticapitalist turn. This is to be done with the help of a strong social movement which did not manifest itself in the 2024 campaign. For Hollande, the socialists by contrast have a vision.

What Hollande elides here is that while elements of Mitterand’s turn towards austerity may have been the pragmatic response to the “wall of money”, the turn towards Europe was an ideological choice. Bruno Amable and Stefano Palombarini demonstrate in intimate detail in their book The Last Neoliberal how European integration and the abandonment of class politics was at the heart of the “Second Left” within the Socialist Party. The Second Left had its own ideological agenda, but no base that agreed with its program, so it pursued that program anyway—while searching for a new electorate. Meanwhile the working-class left slowly dropped out of politics, or drifted to the far right. The Second Left found this electorate in the “bourgeois bloc” a social grouping that was becoming visible after the 2005 referendum result was overturned and which cut across support for the Gaullist UMP on the centre right and the PS on the centre left.

Hollande relied on the left-wing fraction of the bourgeois bloc in combination with what remained of the left’s working-class vote to win power, before promptly betraying the latter half of his coalition and governing on behalf of the former. The El Khomri law demonstrates the impossibility of marrying these two parts of the electorate together by offering a program of “flexicurity”. As the unions pointed out, it was all flexibility for companies, no security for workers. This in turn gave rise to Macron, who was able to unite the left and right halves of the bourgeois bloc to top the polls in the first round and lean on an antifascist vote in the second.

Nowhere in the Challenge of Governing does Hollande address the analysis of Amable and Palombarini which has become part of the operating software of much of the French left. He does not propose what the politics are that can unite the left’s disparate electorates and keep them together. One suspects it is because he has nothing to offer beyond a repeat of his presidency.

When I met Hollande in the course of research for this essay, he told me that “The union of the Left is always a factor that has allowed for victory, but it should follow the orientation of social democracy because the radical left cannot win nor pull in the Left in its entirety. This is what the new prime minister in the UK did to win power: he was able to address his own party, get rid of those on the Left who held too-radical positions, reassure the centrist electorate, and put forward a program which could convince them”.

Hollande told me this at his book signing in November last year. Since then, Keir Starmer has cratered in the polls and is presiding over a far-right surge. On both sides of the channel, it appears that “social democracy” amounts to lying to the electorate and then collapsing when the con is revealed. As Mélenchon writes in Now the People! “social democracy’s commitment to the ‘laws of the market’ has everywhere transformed it into a zealous destroyer of the social gains for which it once fought. Many thus accuse social democracy of betraying its own historic programme. They denounce it for doggedly applying measures wholly at odds with its own promises, for instance in France under François Hollande’s presidency (2012–17)”.

To this he adds “yet this does not really get to the heart of the issue. Even if social democracy were to return to its old programme, it would still be obsolete and unsustainable”. Mélenchon lays out the new program of ecological planning, alter-globalising diplomacy, and democratic control of networks in Now the People!—but the question of the political bloc required to carry it out remains up in the air. Mélenchon believes that the political dynamic of the Citizens’ Revolution will empty out the space in the centre, leaving a radical left and far right standing. The legislative elections of 2024 certainly seemed to confirm this dynamic, but the left was able to come first through its unity, a unity which Hollande and others have made considerable progress in destroying, wrenching the PS to the right.

I also met Mélenchon in the course of writing this essay, at an antifascist dinner in Paris. I suggested that his leadership of the French left was the reason France retains an electorally viable left populist party. He demurred, instead arguing that the exception was France not Mélenchon, placing the emphasis on the French people rather than on himself. But the fate of the People, and the Citizens’ Revolution is by no means certain.

The France Unbowed is going to try and activate more abstentionists in order to power their victory. Manuel Bompard—the Unbowed’s coordinator—puts forward a theory of the “4th bloc”^[4], arguing that there is a sufficient pool of abstentionists whose sociological profile and political beliefs overlap with the voters of the left who could be activated to turbocharge a Mélenchon candidacy in the first round. It has also been suggested that they, like Macron, could try and lean on an antifascist vote if necessary to carry him over the line in the second round. Assuming that Bompard’s maths are correct, this still leaves a question mark hanging over the strategy: will centrist voters break for Mélenchon,whose demonisation has been paralleled only by the de-demonisation of Le Pen?

Mélenchon emphasises that the theory of the Citizens’ Revolution laid out in Now the People! has benefitted from testing in the political arena across the course of three presidential campaigns, as well as by observing the “urban revolts” in France. It states that there are three phases: first, Destituent: the throwing out and tearing down of the status quo; second, Instituent: the People recognising itself as a political actor; and thirdly, Constituent: in which the new order is built through a Constituent Assembly. A Mélenchon victory would be the culmination of the Destituent and Instituent phases, but losing the presidential election could see the throw-them-all-out energy of the Destituent phase funnelled into defenstrating the political centre and replacing them with the far right.

Although he predicts a hollowing out of the centre, Mélenchon’s opponents remain unconvinced. Hollande told me that he believes there will be at least two left candidates at the next election, with his wing of the PS casting around for their own tribune who hopes to outdo Anne Hidalgo’s 1.7% in 2022. The 2027 presidential election will mark 19 years since the Reims congress, yet François Hollande and Jean Luc Mélenchon remain locked in battle.