Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s strategy of brutalization

“There will be no national agreement with LFI,” declared the evening of the first round, March 15, 2026, the secretary general of the Socialist Party, Olivier Faure.

The next day, in Toulouse (Haute-Garonne), in Nantes (Loire-Atlantique), led by Johanna Rolland, the number 2 of the PS, in Grenoble (Isère), in Clermont-Ferrand (Puy-de-Dôme), in Brest (Finistère), in Limoges (HauteVienne), in Avignon (Vaucluse), in Tulle (Corrèze), in Aubervilliers (Seine-SaintDenis), in Lorient (Morbihan) – but not in Paris or Marseille – the socialists merged with La France insoumise (LFI), strong in its push into working-class suburbs and city centers.

Agreements that Faure says he “understands perfectly” even if he had denounced, two weeks earlier, “the conspiratorial caricatures and the intolerable anti-Semitic remarks of Jean Luc Mélenchon”.

Between ecologists and LFI, it was also time for reunions in Strasbourg, in Tours (Indre-et-Loire), in Lyon, where the green mayors were in difficulty, except in Bordeaux. But at the time of the vote, the radicalization of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s speech and program, this strategy of stifling the moderate left did not work everywhere.

Successes and failures of municipal alliances

If it is a winner in metropolises like Nantes and Lyon, the strategy of union with LFI leads to failures in medium-sized cities, historic left-wing strongholds such as Tulle, Clermont, Brest, Avignon and fails to win Limoges and Toulouse. Conversely, in Marseille (Bouches-du-Rhône), Lille (North), Rennes (Ille-et Vilaine), Pau (Pyrénées-Atlantiques), Le Mans (Sarthe), the PS candidates who had refused the alliance with LFI win.

The credibility of the PS leadership takes a hit. “LFI made us lose, there is no more room for strategic ambiguity,” denounces, by way of mea culpa, the boss of the PS deputies, Boris Vallaud. For LFI, according to Ifop expert François Kraus, it is “a political victory”, but not an electoral one: due to a lack of candidates presented in rural and medium-sized municipalities, “the rebellious lists are far from calling into question the leadership of the traditional forces of the left”.