La France Insoumise

For three years before 1933, the Nazi stormtroopers, TRN troopers, fought on the streets of German cities.

For the same three years, the party, RTM party, campaigned as the one force that could end the fighting in the streets.

The violence they created provoked the need for writing.

This is the oldest trick in the book.

It started with a teacher strike in Châtel on the 17th of September and student marches over the state of the schools.

It grew into a mouvement over the cost of living.

On the 13th of October, Jordan Bardella, the president of Le Pen's party, and I think he's some sort of relationship partner, Nephews, son-in-law, there's always in these authoritarians, it's always a family business.

It's full of archetypes.

All these people with frustrations that hadn't been realized.

You know, who voted, for instance, for La France Insoumise, which now has the largest block in the parliament, but has been prevented from putting its candidate for prime minister into that office.

They basically use administrative methods.

So people are frustrated.

You know, we tried the electoral route.

We got La France Insoumise into Parliament as the biggest bloc.

Then you basically suffocated us.

So now what's left? Obviously, back to the streets.

It is true that La France Insoumise, which is Jean-Luc Mélenchon's party, the far left party in French politics, that they quickly came to the support of the movement.

And after there was dramatic videos of police officers unleashing extreme violence against these high schoolers, you know, there's been stories of High schoolers have lost their hand, blown off by grenades, crowd control grenades to be sure, about flash grenades being shot by police officers right in high schoolers' face, like 15-year-olds who have now gone blind or may lose their one or two eyes, mostly one eye, actually, not one or two.

But so it is true that the LFI and those deputies of the left went – You know, ostensibly to support the movement and also to protect them against police violence, which there was a lot of.

There was a ton of police violence.

I wrote an article for Jacobin, which was published on like the 8th, about some of that.

I think that's what a lot of official opinion wants to make happen.

And, you know, if you repeat things, they can become true.

You know, this narrative that LFI is behind the riots, behind the violence, isn't true.

So at first, the teachers in the school started to protest and then the pupils of the school started doing blockades.

Within four days, you had far-left MPs from the France Unbound, LFI, which is the hard-left party in France, who went there on site and brought their support to the protesters.

Within a week, the protests started to spread to Saint-Denis, which is a department in the north of Paris, which has a very large immigrant population.

And within a few days, the protests started to get nationwide.

So when you see that you have such MPs who are very comfortable around violence, it is difficult, the critics point out, to claim that you have no responsibility in the violence that is happening.

So much so, actually, that...

After the October 17th protests, when we have seen all this ransacking happening across France, we have seen some LFI MPs actually saying that the first thing that they were going to do is... to verify whether the conditions of detention in the police stations, whether these conditions of detentions for the protesters that had been arrested were good and legal.

But they did not condemn the violence that had been happening beforehand.

And he's viewed by many as an anti-Semite.

And I think, you know, that has polarized a lot positions around La France Insoumise.

So I think, you know, his strategy has been to polarize the public opinion around a number of issues, you know, around wealth taxation, around Gaza, around, you know, the use of violence.

And so that has cut both ways.

Went down to the street to protest against the president and the higher tax and wanted lower taxes.

You had the extreme left party of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, La France Insoumise.

our most powerful far-left party.

I had the chance to write about them in the edition of The Spectator in the UK last week.

So that is what is prompting me to say that it seems that instead of right-wing, left-wing, which is an opposition that is losing power, its significance in modern French and European debate.

You have system anti-system.

The best argument of Marine Le Pen and La France Insoumise is that we never were in power.

Don't blame us for how bad things are.

If you're a French person who's saying, you know, my high school doesn't have toilet paper, it's pretty hard to hear the president's response to that saying, I'm going to go on a Middle Eastern tour and I'm going to fix your problems.

So I think that, you know, this blame game, of course, you know, the far right is saying that it's the La France Insoumise party of the progressive left.

And the progressive left is, of course, saying that it's, you know, attributable to the far right.

The far right's budget proposal is incredibly drastic in terms of the cuts that they would propose to make.

Where in the United States, it's always far right, radical right, and then just, you know, Democrats on the other side, no matter how far crazy they are.

Now, one of them is called La France Insoumise.

I can't, I don't know what the word means.

So does Jean-Luc Mélicon.