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Times
13 hours ago
- Politics
- Times
Napoleon admirer launches new party in bid for presidency
Dominique de Villepin, France's former prime minister, likened himself to Joan of Arc and Napoleon Bonaparte on Tuesday as he signalled his intention to become president. De Villepin, 71, who led his country's refusal to join the war in Iraq in 2003, is seeking to portray himself as the saviour of a nation in decline. Opponents accuse him of a cheap attempt to exploit the country's political chaos by appealing to left-wing Muslims and mainstream centrist voters. He has launched his own political party, La France Humaniste (Humanist France), which he hopes will carry him to the Élysée in 2027. The move is reminiscent of President Macron's strategy in 2016, when he founded his own party before a successful run for the presidency a year later. Macron campaigned as an outsider who would rise above petty political squabbling to lead pragmatists into battle against populism. De Villepin seems to be employing the same tactics, although he denied following in Macron's footsteps. With the incumbent unable to run for a third term, the 2027 election is clouded in uncertainty. Marine Le Pen, leader of the populist right National Rally and frontrunner in the polls, has been barred from running for office after being convicted of corruption. She will only be able to stand if she overturns her sentence on appeal next year. On the left, the radical Jean-Luc Mélenchon is keen to stand for a fourth time but has been accused of antisemitism. On the centre-right there are half a dozen contenders, although none have captured the public imagination to emerge as a favourite. De Villepin, who was interior minister, foreign minister and prime minister during the presidency of Jacques Chirac between 2002 and 2007, has yet to announce his candidacy officially but has made clear his intention to run. An Ifop poll last month found him to be the country's most popular politician with 51 per cent of respondents saying they had a good opinion of him. His aim is to win broad support by reaching out to the left with a pro-Arab message while hoping that his record in government will be enough to ensure support from the centre and the centre-right. In interviews with French media outlets, he suggested that Macron had demeaned the presidency by meddling in day-to-day politics and said that France needed an 'arbiter' above the fray who would 'inspire the nation'. Vaunting his experience in government he added: 'We need more professionalism and less of a bidding war [between politicians] in television studios.' He said the launch of La France Humaniste was the 'starting point for an action that stems from a great French tradition'. In a pitch for voters on the left and right, he cast himself as heir to the country's greatest figures: the likes of Joan of Arc; Napoleon Bonaparte; Jean Jaurès, the socialist assassinated in 1914; Pierre Mendès-France, the moderate postwar leftwinger; and General Charles de Gaulle, the resistance leader and president. Detractors, however, believe he is making a cynical grab for a left-wing ethnic minority vote with his outspoken criticism of Israel's military intervention in Gaza.
New York Times
07-05-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Jean-Luc Mélenchon Talks About the Future of the Left
Last summer, nervous liberals breathed a sigh of relief when a snap election in France ended in surprise defeat for the far right and its fearsome leader, Marine Le Pen. But the hero of that election was in many ways not Emmanuel Macron, who called the election nominally to sideline Le Pen and then marshaled embarrassingly little public support for his own party. It was Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the polarizing leftist, often described as France's Bernie Sanders, whose coalition won the most seats, pushing Le Pen's National Rally — once favored to win the election — into third place. In the months that followed, Macron struggled to form a governing coalition without Mélenchon's La France Insoumise party or the broader New Popular Front alliance the leftists had cobbled together during the brief campaign. Instead, Macron ultimately made an unstable arrangement with the right, turning Mélenchon into a strange kind of marginalized figure: perhaps the rich world's most electorally successful leftist, both the face of European left populism and the reason the continent's most feared right-wingers had been kept out of power, but now haunting European politics like an ambiguous apparition. Today the left alliance looks weaker than it did last summer, and a conviction for embezzlement temporarily barring Le Pen from running for office has made her into something of a haunting apparition, too. The future of French politics — and its lessons for the continent — looks again quite unstable. Last month, Mélenchon made a rare trip to the United States, where Verso is publishing his 'Now, the People! Revolution in the 21st Century,' and we spoke for an hour or so, with the help of several interpreters. What follows is an edited and condensed version of that conversation. In the United States, the conventional liberal view of European politics runs something like this: The center is in shambles, the left is in retreat and the right is on the march. What are we missing in our solipsism?
