The French left are deliberately ‘fucking things up’. By Fraser Myers at spiked.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the Islamo-left firebrand and presidential candidate for La France Insoumise (LFI), … has been busy fanning the flames….
French prime minister Sébastien Lecornu … has even accused Mélenchon of promoting a deliberate strategy of ‘bordélisation’ – loosely translated as ‘fucking things up’, sowing chaos — as a means to discredit the Macron government and the French state more broadly for the left’s political benefit. …
If [fucking things up] strikes you as an odd political strategy for winning over the majority of French voters, who are enraged and saddened at the sight of their cities being sacked and set alight, then you’re not alone. Mélenchon is currently polling second in the race for the French presidency, but is still a long way behind the frontrunner, Marine Le Pen. … Each new viral video of a beloved French building on fire brings her National Rally closer to victory.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon — pivoted the French left from old France (“old” and “ugly”) to new France (young, urban, Muslim and immigrant). Look in the mirror bro.
Mélenchon’s nudges and winks to the rioters might make little sense in purely electoral terms, but his pitch is not really aimed at the majority of French voters.
His overarching project is to construct what he calls a ‘New France’, with young, urban communities from migrant and especially Muslim backgrounds as the left’s new political base.
The aim is not to assimilate new migrants into French culture, but to use migrants as a battering ram to help dismantle French culture. In this vision, the enemy — the ‘Old France’ — encompasses not only the right-leaning bourgeoisie, but also the traditionally leftist white working class. It means opposing not just social conservatism and the Catholic Church, as you’d expect of the left, but also the liberal, Enlightenment-derived republican values that the French left once held dear.
The Old France, Mélenchon wails, is ‘all white, all ugly’. Even its democratic system, he claims, is loaded with ‘white privilege’ and thus ‘obsolete’. He has even tried to argue that the French people and even the French language do not really exist any more, with both undergoing a process of ‘creolisation’.
‘Those who call themselves “native French”’, the LFI leader warns, ‘pose a serious problem for social cohesion’. The notion of a ‘native Frenchman’, he insists, ‘no longer exists and will never exist again’.
In this vein, Mélenchon now self-identifies as ‘Maghrébin’, or North African. And while it is true that he was born in Tangier in Morocco, and moved to France as a child, he was part of a family of so-called pieds-noirs — that is, French people born in the Maghreb, but forced to relocate when the old empire began to fall. In the New France, most identities are welcome — except French, of course. …
Lefties will do anything for power:
The most head-spinning aspect of Mélenchon’s identitarian turn has been his transformation from militant secularist to apologist for Islamism.
In the 2010s, he fiercely rejected the term ‘Islamophobia’, insisting that we have ‘a right and, in some cases, a duty to criticise religion’. He described the Islamic veil as a ‘rag on the head’. And in January 2015, he delivered a furious eulogy for his late friend and ‘comrade’, Charb, one of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists who had just been slain by Islamist terrorists. …
On 7 January 2025, on the 10th anniversary of the Charlie murders, Mélenchon’s tone could not have been more different. His tribute took the form of a convoluted blog post, in which he mentioned the ‘criminals’ who killed his comrade, but not the ‘religious fanaticism’ that inspired their evil. To do so, he meekly explained, would only help to ‘divide us in order to weaken us’. This mealy mouthed condemnation was bad enough, but Mélenchon and his party’s response to the 7 October massacre in Israel bordered on atrocity apologism.
If the left’s not promoting replacement, what do you call it?