Jean-Luc Mélenchon at l’Université Paris-Est Créteil on March 28, 2024
On March 28, 2024, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, founder and head of La France Insoumise, spoke before a university crowd at Paris XII (Paris-Est Creteil, a public university, founded in 1970). He was campaigning for the elections to the European Parliament in June, and he was accompanied by LFI Deputy and close advisor Clémence Guetté. She delivered a standard stump speech: the fight against the macronistes and the extreme right is the same fight; Macron has cost the nation 50 billion euros per year in taxes because he won’t touch the very rich and the multinationals. Raphael Glucksmann, who is heading the Socialist Party list for the Européennes, refuses to acknowledge the “risk” of genocide in Gaza. She had begun by quoting Trotsky; she would end with Robespierre, who said that one has done nothing unless he destroys the structures which maintain the inequality of the people.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon began slowly, speaking directly to the students, and with the warmth that has greatly contributed to his popularity. “Each generation is a new people–look at yourselves, you are the new French people.” He quoted Margaret Thatcher, about whom most of the students probably did not share the same visceral reaction of older generations; she had said that “society” does not exist, but rather “a group of individuals building their own lives.” (It’s not clear when she said it, but it sounds like her. And he said it to refute the stark individualism of contemporary life.) It was their job–whatever their ethnicity, religion, skin color–to build the next France, not to glorify some “mythic identity” [of what it means to be French]. He described himself as the first in his family to get a degree, that many in the audience were in the same position and carried the hopes of their families with them. As many people know, he continued, I am “magrebin European.” (He was born in Tangier, Morocco, to Spanish parents, who moved to France in 1962, when he was 11.) Throughout history, he added, people have always migrated, and always for the same reason–to find their own space.
He touched upon the massacre occurring in Gaza briefly but had quickly gone back to “our society destroyed by neoliberalism,” when the meeting was suddenly interrupted by shouting, a disturbance that led to a Jewish student being escorted out of the hall. The livestream cut out for a few moments, but of course it appeared shortly thereafter on twitter. X no longer allows the embedding of tweets unless one has a blue check mark, but the tweets are available in the link, below, from Libération.
The first shows the students chanting “cease fire,” and the student being taken up the stairs by security to the exit; the X post is labeled, “about 100 students demanded the departure of a Jewish student, to the shouts of “Cease fire.” This particular video had been viewed more than 300,000 times. Another account, viewed 80,000 times, said much the same, describing the students in the audience as “pro-Palestinian,” and said that security had expelled him by force. In its investigative feature “Checknews,” Libération reported that the incident had been a planned demonstration against the presence of Mélenchon, often accused of antisemitism, by a few students carrying signs that said “LFI antisemitic and pro-Putin, piss off!” The interruption had been carried out by the Union des etudiants juifs de France, or UEJF. Their president, Samuel Lovejoy, was not disturbed that they had been forced to leave–they of course had expected that–but by the fact that rather than engaging with the charge of antisemitism the students had gone immediately to shouts of “Cease fire!” Aside from Liberation, the impression left was that pro-Palestinian students had refused to tolerate the presence of a Jewish student disruptor. Which was essentially true.
After the interruption Mélenchon, referring to the “racistes we have just seen,” had returned immediately to his comfort zone. Neoliberalism has destroyed the world we live in. Capitalism has destroyed the ecosystem. Macron’s Minister of the Economy, Bruno Le Maire, originally a member of Les Républicains, has been publicly agonizing over the large deficit (at the approach of elections, Les Républicains, like their US counterparts, become hysterical over the debt), and his choice was to fix it by cutting unemployment insurance. The discussion of Le Maire’s proposal was accurate.
Mélenchon returned briefly to immigration, and noted the plight of the fisherman in Sénégal who emigrated because the European Union was overfishing off their shores. That, too, is true; but Mélenchon neglected to mention that China is one of the worst offenders, one of his beloved BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa). Both China and the EU had signed treaties with Senegal; both had cheated by “incursions” into prohibited waters. But in foreign affairs, Mélenchon is sympathetic to autocracies–particularlly those of the non-western BRICS nations–so it is no surprise that he omitted China. His support of Putin is, indeed, his Achilles’ heel in terms of politics; in that sense, the distraction of Gaza has allowed him to take a stance, on behalf of Gaza, that is far more popular.
Mélenchon at one point held up his notes, sheets of paper which were covered with scattered words and phrases; he had given this speech before. In the conclusion, he noted that capitalism had found a brilliant solution to all its failures, and that was war. He mentioned the Ukraine war, pirouetted over the fact that it was Putin who started it, to repeat that it is capitalism that loves wars, and then noted that anyone who wants to start a war with a nuclear power (Macron, against Putin) isn’t using his head. There are 29 nuclear reactors in Ukraine, he said, and all are on the banks of rivers, which all flow into the Mediterranean, which has 500 million people living around it–which means that trying to stop Putin puts at risk half a billion people.
The end of the war must come through negotiation. Putin must be given security guarantees, and it must be made clear that Ukraine will never join NATO. “The people” should vote on whether they want to remain in Ukraine or join Russia–he did not single out Donbass as the area under discussion, but otherwise he came to a similar conclusion floated recently by the Trump team. He blamed Hollande for allowing anti-missile missiles in Poland, which turned Europe into a land of warfare once again–in reference to a complicated decade-plus long set of strategic decisions (after Russian incursions into Georgia, the Chechen Republic, Donbass, the seizure of Crimea). That, like many of his historical references, met with no applause or even recognition. He returned to “what’s his name–Glucksmann” (laughter and cheers), whom the LFI really fear as a challenger, and who has become a regular punching bag in the campaign. Glucksmann, head of the Socialist Party list, worked as an advisor to the dictator Mikhail Shaakashvili in Georgia, he told them, to cheers/boos again–though the complicated post-Soviet politics of the region, again, are not widely known. Russia sponsored the South Ossetians in Georgia in the 1990s and early 2000s; in 2008, Russian troops entered the disputed region to defend Russian citizens.
Which sounds familiar.
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Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Clémence Guetté, Université Paris-Est Créteil, March 28, 2024, Youtube: https://www.youtube.com//C4PItb6HFMg?si=DWKaAryBzgvbETY-
For Libération checknews, with tweets: https://www.liberation.fr/chliveecknews/que-sait-on-de-cette-video-montrant-un-etudiant-juif-expulse-dun-amphi-de-la-fac-de-creteil-20240410_5OFQ7PRYSNCBRKQWCRT75YIIK4/?redirected=1&redirected=1
Michael Levitt, Sarah Handel, Ari Shapiro, “How foreign overfishing is driving migration crisis in Senegal,” npr, February 6, 2023. https://www.npr.org/2023/02/06/1154901472/how-foreign-overfishing-is-driving-migration-crisis-in-senegal; see also https://www.euronews.com/2022/02/11/nothing-there-s-nothing-senegal-s-plummeting-fish-stocks-drive-migrant-surge-to-europe; and :
Isaac Arnsdorf, Josh Dawsey and Michael Birnbaum, “Inside Donald Trump’s secret, long-shot plan to end the war in Ukraine,” The Washington Post, April 7, 2024. https://wapo.st/4cVSXSx
Header Image: Shutterstock; Jean Luc Mélenchon in 2017 with Danielle Simonnet, whom he recently expelled from the party.
