French Communist Party says MPs who defected to Melenchon have ‘placed themselves outside the party’

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THE French Communist Party said on Saturday that four MPs who have endorsed Jean-Luc Melenchon’s presidential candidacy have “of their own accord been placed outside the party.”

Four of the party’s eight MPs, including the leader of the parliamentary group Stephane Peu, announced on Thursday that they would back Mr Melenchon, citing the need for left unity and the challenge of defeating far-right leader Marine Le Pen, who is currently first in the polls.

Mr Melenchon, leader of the left-wing La France Insoumise (LFI), polls second currently, with recent surveys placing him at about 19 per cent to Ms Le Pen on 34-35 per cent. French presidential elections see the top two candidates enter the second round.

There is no agreed Establishment candidate to succeed French President Emmanuel Macron, complicating the polling. Mr Melenchon came third in the 2022 election, missing out on the run-off by less than 1 percentage point.

Mr Peu said Mr Melenchon was the only “credible candidate” who could unite the left. But the decision is a breach of democratic centralism, as the French Communist Party voted at its September congress to run an independent presidential bid under leader Fabien Roussel.

Mr Roussel said the defection was “not very elegant” and that he had learned of it from a press release as they had not phoned him. While the Communist Party’s national council statement that the defectors had “placed themselves outside the party” sounds like expulsion, it also said they would be barred from speaking on behalf of the party “during the campaign,” suggesting the breach might not be permanent.

Mr Melenchon did not seem to think it was, saying he was “moved” to stand “shoulder to shoulder with the Communist group in the struggle to hoist the left into the second round,” and remarking that Mr Peu was “just as communist as he was yesterday.”

He presided over a rally to launch LFI’s manifesto on Saturday. The platform includes a gradual withdrawal of France from Nato, unilateral renunciation of a number of EU regulations, recognises Israel’s genocide in Gaza and rejects further French co-operation with that state, as well as tax rises for the rich and corporations to fund higher wages and public services.

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