A fully organized training around the personality of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, where intimidation and threats are common. This is what “La Meute” (Flammarion) depicts, a survey book on the methods already identified by the operation of rebellious France, published this Wednesday, May.
This investigation into the movement created in 2016 by the former socialist senator, written by journalists Charlotte Belaïch (Liberation) and Olivier Pérou (Le Monde), puts the radical left movement in embarrassment at the very moment when the figure of Jean-Luc Mélenchon is very contested in the perspective of 2027.
A clan logic
This book, the fruit of a two-year work during which they interviewed 200 people, describes a training completely organized around the personality of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, where intimidation and threats are common.
“Delap would be ashamed of you,” would have written the Insoumis tribune in a message to Charlotte Girard, the widow of François Delapierre, one of the most faithful allies of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, died in 2015. His fault? Having left LFI by issuing criticisms of the functioning of the rebellious machine.
This is added to the testimonies already collected, in particular after the purge during the last legislative elections during which several former close to Jean-Luc Mélenchon, accused in particular of opposing internal practices, had been dismissed from LFI.
“We saw a party refocusing a little on a logic of clan and which absolutely did not seem to us likely to untie the strategic debates necessary to find the right way to become the majority,” commented AFP Clémentine Autain, excluded in July. These evictions were facilitated by the fact that this movement was theorized as “gas”, that is to say in particular without congresses to allow its leaders to elect.
“It won’t interest anyone”
Within LFI, we sweep criticism. “There is nothing new with this book,” quips a deputy. “There have already been ten books like that. It will not interest anyone, “had already assured the coordinator of the Manuel Bompard movement last week, qualifying on Tuesday, the work of” Fiction “.
He takes as an example a passage concerning him personally: when he was a European deputy in 2019, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, of whom he is now his right arm, would have launched him “buy yourself a brain”, while Manuel Bompard had fallen into disgrace with the patriarch after the bad results of LFI to the Europeans. “As Jean-Luc Mélenchon never said that, I took it as an invention,” said Manuel Bompard.
-“Insoumise France absolutely does not correspond to what this book says,” also said the owner of rebellious deputies, Mathilde Panot, denouncing a work which, according to her, reports “lies after lies”.
Will this be enough to convince, when the book comes out in an already complicated period for the rebellious, marked in particular by the charges of anti-Semitism concerning the visual on Cyril Hanouna? “I do not think that this book changes the opinion of the French on Jean-Luc Mélenchon. These are known to be known, ”said the owner of Marine Tondelier environmentalists. “You are dealing with a generation of rebellious people who cannot remain insensitive to all of this,” said an ecological deputy, regularly in contact with the radical left movement.
Within LFI, expressions of protest, even under the cover of anonymity, are very rare since the purges of 2024.
“Behavior of a sect”
It is therefore from the outside that criticisms came. “From what I read about me, that’s right. Undoubtedly there is an operating problem in this movement, ”assured Franceinfo the deputy for the ecological group Alexis Corbière.
“We do not make the Life Republic and a more democratic society when we operate internally as a movement that does not tolerate the disagreement,” added this former nearby among the relatives of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, ousted during the last purge.
“I understand that the behavior of the management of rebellious France approached the behavior of a sect under the influence of a couple, that of Jean-Luc Mélenchon and his partner Sophia Chikirou”, herself deputy of Paris, denounced for his part the boss of the Communists, Fabien Roussel.
Rare outdoor support displayed to the rebellious, that of Nathalie Arthaud, spokesperson for the far left party struggle. “The pack which activates, on the left, against Mélenchon is well trained and ridiculous. Especially since she only seeks to take the place, ”said the figure of the Trotskyist party.
