ABSTRACT
In June 2016, as I observed the massive marches through Paris with Nuit debout members in the vanguard, I took a photo of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a longtime leftist, previously in the Socialist Party, who had formed his own party, La France insoumise (LFI), and announced that he would run for president in the national elections in 2017 ( Le Monde 2016). He was walking from the front to the back of a demonstration, causing some stir as marchers pointed him out. A few stopped to talk with him. However, he was not greeted as a hero or savior in any way. When I asked some of the activists of Nuit debout what they thought of him, they dismissed him as one of the hidebound old Marxists who offered no new pathways. He had run for president in 2012 and come fourth, with 11.1% of the national vote ( Le Monde 2016). In an interview I had conducted in 2015 with a progressive academic, who was trying to map out the left political terrain for me, Mélenchon was also characterized as a kind of failed, leftist has-been. However, after Nuit debout, in 2017, as the French election campaigns commenced, Mélenchon began to gain traction.
