Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leftist presidential candidate for the La France Insoumise party, declared that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is obsolete. Speaking to “Welt am Sonntag”, the candidate stated that NATO serves solely to drag countries into conflicts that are not their own. Mélenchon, who is polling as the strongest left-wing challenger to Marine Le Pen’s right-wing Rassemblement National, expressed skepticism regarding the widespread push for militarization, which he attributed to the Russian threat. He questioned the premise that Russia would invade countries like Germany, France, or Belgium.
His criticism extended to Germany’s assertive role in Europe, arguing that the Federal Republic “can no longer afford arrogance.” He pointed to the fact that Germany has experienced a recession for the third consecutive year, asking, “Where did the class topper go, the one who knew everything and taught us where to go?”
Mélenchon, who identified himself as a Marxist with a materialist analysis, argued that France had been destroyed by four decades of neoliberalism, leaving the bourgeois center a vacant shell. He suggested that the United States had effectively killed neoliberalism through the use of tariffs and the abandonment of free trade. Furthermore, he criticized the political spectrum, stating that conservatives could offer nothing but fear of Muslims, Arabs, and Black people, while social democrats failed by accepting the neoliberal rules of the Lisbon Treaty.
Regarding his economic platform, particularly the promise of a pension starting at age 60, Mélenchon refuted the idea of a simple lack of funds. Instead, he insisted that the core issue lay in how the economy is organized, asserting that everything is a matter of distribution. To manage the enormous national debt that the next president would inherit, he proposed a fundamental change in tax policy. “We will ask those who do not pay to pay,” he concluded.
