Mélenchon's Russia blind spot threatens to fracture France's left

Théodore Abitbol has spent a decade as a full-time activist. He holds degrees in political science and comparative literature. His bookshelf holds bell hooks and Mike Davis. He shows up to pro-Palestine protests. By every measure, he should be voting for Jean-Luc Mélenchon in France's 2027 presidential race.

Mélenchon leads La France Insoumise, the hard-left party that has actually moved the needle in places the French political establishment had written off. Bally Bagayoko won the mayoral race in Saint-Denis despite racist abuse. David Guiraud broke a 40-year right-wing hold on Roubaix, one of France's poorest large cities. The party's parliamentarians are drafting radical proposals—extending legal rights to close friendships, for instance. On economic policy, on the redistribution of wealth, on giving voice to the left-behind in France's struggling urban cores, Mélenchon is doing something necessary.

But Abitbol cannot bring himself to vote for him. When asked recently why, he was direct: Mélenchon's positions on Russia, Ukraine, and the European Union are disqualifying. "A part of the French left retains a cold-war mentality where Russia is an ally against American imperialism, without seeing that Putin and Trump are in agreement about almost everything in their foreign and domestic policies," Abitbol said. He is not alone in this bind. Millions of French voters, the polling suggests, crave the economic rupture Mélenchon offers but have no appetite for where he would take France on the world stage.

Mélenchon polls at around 17 percent, enough to reach the second round of the presidential election. The fragmented non-Mélenchon left—Ecologists, Socialists, Communists—trails him, with Raphaël Glucksmann leading a split field at roughly 10 percent. But the numbers also show that Marine Le Pen would defeat Mélenchon 69 to 31 in a runoff. This is the trap: a divided left could hand power to the far right.

The foreign policy record is the problem. Since 2014, Mélenchon has consistently advanced what amounts to Kremlin talking points. When young Ukrainians filled Kyiv's streets during the Maidan Revolution demanding a European future, Mélenchon called it a putsch orchestrated by neo-Nazis. When Putin annexed Crimea, Mélenchon claimed it had "always been Russian." In 2015, when France cancelled the sale of two advanced Mistral-class helicopter carriers to Russia in response to Putin's aggression, Mélenchon joined Marine Le Pen in denouncing the decision as France's "vassalisation to NATO's bellicose rhetoric." He called it an "unbearable betrayal" by then-president François Hollande.

For the next seven years, Mélenchon invoked international law selectively—condemning American unilateral action in Syria while minimizing or defending Russia's unilateral actions and war crimes there, which killed an estimated 20,000 civilians by conservative count. He dismissed Russia's former Soviet neighbors' sovereign choice to join NATO as provocative. Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia—EU and NATO members since 2004, among Ukraine's largest donors by GDP—drew his scorn. "I feel nothing in common with them, it's the end of the world, even the Romans never made it that far," he said in 2017. He seemed incurious about why countries that had been occupied by an aggressive, territorially expansionist petro-oligarchy might want to join a defensive alliance.

When Putin invaded Ukraine in 2022, Mélenchon's position did not budge. He claimed Ukraine was "without a doubt" the aggressor, that Russia felt "humiliated, threatened, aggressed" by the US decision to "annex Ukraine into NATO." (The invasion, of course, accelerated Sweden and Finland's sovereign decisions to join.) In the four years since, Mélenchon's blog posts and media appearances have echoed the same narratives that Xenia Federova, former director of RT France, promoted on the rightwing network CNews before France expelled her and froze her assets. He calls for bringing Russia "back into the fold," reopening Nord Stream gas pipelines, dismisses Zelenskyy as "president of nothing," and accuses other Europeans of having "demonised Putin." He has also declared that "Taiwan is China."

This is not principled leftism. It is not even coherent anti-imperialism. It is the logic of "the enemy of my enemy," consequences be damned for the less powerful. Mélenchon has not updated his worldview since 1985, when he first held office. But the world has changed. His position is no longer anti-American; it is simply to attack from inside what Putin seeks to dismantle from outside. He has made no secret of his desire to withdraw France from NATO, to "assume confrontation with European institutions," and to "disobey" EU rules "whenever necessary." This is not how you lead change in an imperfect but functional framework for tackling challenges that transcend borders—climate, inequality, trade. This is how you destroy it from within, which is precisely what Europe's far-right nationalists want. If France decides it can ignore EU rules at will, so can everyone else. The emissions trading scheme collapses. The carbon border tax fails. The entire institutional architecture deteriorates. Abitbol, asked if he would vote for Mélenchon in a runoff against Le Pen, said yes—"with vomit in my mouth." Pity him and the millions like him forced to choose between two equally disastrous visions of France's place in the world.