Editorial. François Ruffin castigates Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s communitarian drift

The MP, who broke with La France Insoumise at the time of the legislative elections, criticises “a left that has given up” and has chosen to “abandon” a part of the population. He is strongly critical of the strategy implemented by Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

François Ruffin draws up an indictment of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s strategy. The deputy from the Somme broke with the leader of the Insoumis during the two rounds of the legislative elections. And he goes much further in a new book, Itinerary. My France in its entirety, not halfwayand in an interview with New Obs, Wednesday, September 11. The charge is heavy, and serious. François Ruffin castigates Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s communitarian drift. He accuses him of focusing exclusively on the vote of minorities and suburbs, and of drawing a line under that of the working classes of rural and peri-urban France that he abandons to the National Rally. In short, the leader of the Insoumis “racialize” politics, an even more spectacular development since the October 7 massacres in Israel. And it thus acts as a mirror to the extreme right, which focuses on the other France.

For Jean-Luc Mélenchon, trying to win back the popular vote in the countryside and small and medium-sized towns is a waste of time. According to François Ruffin, he “essentialize” entire territories, Hauts-de-France or the South, which he considers lost forever to the left. “It took half a century to denazify Germany…”Jean-Luc Mélenchon is said to have whispered to him. The elected representative from the Somme even attributes to the Insoumis contemptuous remarks for the voters of Hénin-Beaumont, the stronghold of Marine Le Pen in Pas-de-Calais, where Mélenchon had been beaten in 2012. “People who were sweating alcohol from the morning,” ““smelled bad”, “almost all obese”… As a result, François Ruffin confesses his shame at having led a racially biased campaign in his constituency. That is to say, having handed out leaflets with Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s photo to black and Arab voters in the housing projects of Amiens-Nord, for whom he is a “master key”but not to white voters because he is a turn-off to them.

This is not a simple settling of scores. François Ruffin dares to break the taboo that weighs down the left. A communitarian drift that was born on the fringes of the PS. It was theorized in 2011 by the Terra Nova foundation in a note that has remained famous. It encouraged the left to replace the workers, seduced by the Le Pen vote, with a new majority composed of minorities, graduates, women and urban dwellers. Thirteen years later, the Insoumis are content to court the vote of the “bobos” graduates of the metropolises and that of those they call the “racialized” in the suburbs. A calculation that undoubtedly condemns the left to remain in the opposition for a long time to come. And risks leaving the field open to Marine Le Pen.