Little Support for Mélenchon: Can Unity From the Top Carry a Movement?

According to Mediapart, Stéphane Peu, head of the Communist group at the National Assembly, explains in an interview why he supports Jean-Luc Mélenchon, candidate of La France insoumise in the presidential election. The deputy judges this candidacy, still according to the paper, to be the only credible prospect on the left for blocking the far right in 2027. We only have the summary of the interview: his detailed arguments, any possible counterparts and the official position of the Parti communiste are not in the report. What follows is therefore our reading, not an established fact.

One can welcome the gesture: in a left exhausted by turf wars, a communist leader chooses not to add one more candidacy to the catalogue. But look at the formula chosen: "barrer la route", blocking the road. This is the grammar of the barricade, of defence. We unite because we are afraid, not because we are moving forward. The question is not whether unity is desirable, it is, but what it carries.

The criterion is simple, and it comes from Luxemburg: a measure, an alliance, a compromise is worth what it does to the power and confidence of workers, depending on whether it increases them or demobilises them. An electoral alliance born in the corridors of the Palais-Bourbon can very well become a foothold for millions of people organising themselves. It can also be nothing more than a ballot box, where you deposit your vote every five years while professionals manage the rest. Reformism does not need bad intentions to become management of capital; it only needs to make the election the horizon.

Gramsci, to be fair, reminded us that parliamentary experience is not vain: the socialists who worked "au plus près des choses", as close as possible to real things, brought the masses into political life, despite their errors. To refuse electoral ground on principle is sometimes to condemn yourself to speaking alone. So we have no reason to scorn Mr Peu's rallying. We have to ask what he does with the assemblies, the unions, the neighbourhood committees that have no seat in the group.

That is where the future is decided. Mass movements rarely erupt to order, often from a tiny spark, and they educate faster than any party school. A unity candidacy will be useful if it knows how to listen to them, not if it claims to get ahead of them. Does popular energy turn into lasting organisation, or only into votes? The whole debate rests on that difference.

And if the far right is fought less by barriers than by living dykes, someone on the left will have to learn to let the water rise.