For the Insoumis campaign team, there is no debate: Jean-Luc Melenchon is above all the candidate for peace. His positions deemed pro-Putin would be taken out of context. Those are “fanciful accusations”explains one of his relatives.
So what does it matter if the candidate has often been, at the very least, ambiguous. Qwhen he said, in 2016, that Putin was going “solve the problem” in Syria, or when he said last December that “Russia is not an enemy but a partner”… And the list is long. Sthose around us prefer to keep statements where Jean-Luc Mélenchon advocates non-alignment with the United States, or when he castigated the imprisonment of left-wing activists in Russia.
His ambiguities, his possible blindness… Whatever the rebels say, this places Jean-Luc Mélenchon in the box, not very comfortable at the moment, of friends of Russia. AT left, he is heavily attacked by Anne Hidalgo and Yannick Jadot. “VS’is the theater of the presidential election, we try to assign the candidates to something”regrets one of her advisers who denounces a Manichean vision of international subjects.
However, some in his camp want to believe that these attacks can strengthen their candidate. When Anne Hidalgo explains that Jean-Luc Mélenchon is “accomplice of dictators”that it is “an agent in the service of Putin”this does not frighten the Insoumis: “It’s so grotesque that it serves us”plays down an LFI deputy. “NOTour voters don’t care, they listen to what we say on the merits, not the caricatures that are made of us”wants to believe a relative of the candidate.
This optimism is not shared by a pollster we reached last night: in view of the various recent studies, he notes that the momentum enjoyed by Jean-Luc Mélenchon since February has slowed down since the start of the war in Ukraine. “VSThe controversies will not bring him down, but he will probably find it more difficult to recruit on the left”deciphers this opinion specialist.
Today Jean-Luc Mélenchon remains largely in the lead on the left, at 11% in our last barometer Ipsos-Sopra Steria.