Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the candidate of France insubordinate to the presidential election 2022, intervened Tuesday, November 16 in an unexpected environment, since he was questioned for nearly two hours by the students of Essec, a large business school which he therefore considers to be one of the temples of capitalism. The member for Bouches-du-Rhône knew how to use this opportunity in an unexpected way.
During that evening, he gave an astonishing answer to one of the questions put to him. “Would you prefer to be the minister of Yannick Jadot or Anne Hidalgo?”, so questioned a student. This type of question is a very classic trap for a candidate in an election. Indeed, there is a general rule in rhetoric: to accept to answer a question is to admit that the question arises. In other words, to answer the question frankly “whose minister could you be?”, it is already accepting to consider that one might not be in the best position within his camp to win the election.
There is therefore a standard response to get out of such a bad situation. Any politician would respond using the same kind of stereotypical formula: “You know, I don’t see myself in that perspective. I think I’m going to win the presidential election. So I encourage you, instead, to ask them if they would consider being my ministers!” We are really in the context of a game of chess, where one of the players would try a worn-out tactic: the opponent just needs to know it, and know which pawn to move, to neutralize it.
However, this is not what Jean-Luc Mélenchon did! “I want to tell you that it depends for what to do but they are respectable people. It seems to me that Mrs Hidalgo does not have very clear ideas on what to do. I would therefore prefer to be the minister of someone who at least said he had joined ecological planning. I could take care of that in his government, why not “, he replied. It is therefore incredible but true: Jean-Luc Mélenchon answers the question asked. He agrees to consider himself as the minister of a hypothetical President Jadot!
Be careful though, there is some math behind this. The response of Jean-Luc Mélenchon is indeed not trivial. On the one hand, it is an opportunity for him to address an attack on each of his two main competitors. Anne Hidalgo would not have “not very clear ideas”, notice that she will appreciate it. As for Yannick Jadot, he would have “rallied ecological planning”, which is a way of asserting that La France Insoumise would henceforth be at the forefront of the ecological fight.
Above all, the problem with the cliché response is … precisely that it is a cliché! Today, everyone spotted it, so much so that by pretending to dodge it, above all, it annoys people. On the contrary, by responding directly, Jean-Luc Mélenchon offers himself the luxury of emitting images: he suddenly seems frank and sincere, two qualities that politicians seek at all costs to dismiss on their own.
However, not all policies answer these types of questions like this. There are three reasons for this. The first is contextual: we are not on television. Jean-Luc Mélenchon knows that he is not at risk of seeing his sentence repeated immediately on the banner of a television screen. The second is personal: for months Jean-Luc Mélenchon has been repeating, in all tones, that he will present himself no matter what. He can therefore afford this little moment of frankness: he knows that no one doubts his ambitions.
The third is rhetoric. The fact is that, for many politicians – including sometimes Jean-Luc Mélenchon himself – the ready-made answers become a kind of reflexes, a frozen process that they use to protect themselves without asking themselves if this remains justified. The first victim is of course the public debate, which is considerably obscured. However, sometimes the most effective rhetoric is also the most transparent.