The expression “new France” launched by Jean-Luc Mélenchon is rooted in simple sociological and economic observations learned by any student at university, and which illustrate the changes that have occurred in recent decades.
These terms are not new, they have been used regularly since the 1970s by political leaders, who wanted to characterize, whatever their side, the changes in French society. Seeing it, as Mélenchon’s detractors do, as opposition to a France of the past seems to be a misreading. The candidate’s first speech for the 2027 presidential election underlines that the essential thing is elsewhere.
Change of Republic
When Jean-Luc Mélenchon uses these terms of “new France”, it is, of course, a question of responding to the National Rally in an imagined duel of a second round of the presidential election, but above all of redefining French identity and presenting a program made of continuities and ruptures. Indeed, the fundamental question posed by Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s program, already formulated in his previous electoral campaigns, is the change of the Republic.
French society today is no longer the same as in 1958, during the advent of the Fifth Republic, it is in this sense that he evokes the birth of a Sixth Republic, embodying this new France.
This programmatic aspect is central and often paradoxical. The references used borrow from the past and the memory of the left. Thus, the launch of the campaign took place on June 7, the 90th anniversary of the Matignon agreement ratifying paid leave and the 40-hour week, among the major social conquests of the Popular Front.
References to the past
The musical background of the meeting also drew on the heritage of the left. La Marseillaise and L’Internationale closed the public meeting opened with the broadcast of different rap groups, embodying the new diversity, while Ma France by Jean Ferrat, a classic of communist song, made a link with the past.
Finally, the location of the meeting – the city of Saint-Denis (Seine-Saint-Denis) – and the historical references in the introduction to his speech, as frequently with Mélenchon, including, this time, to royalty – “the Crown does not belong to the one who wears it” – also established a continuity between the past and the present.
The leader of La France insoumise (LFI) wants to be the bearer of the verve and revolutionary history of the country, also made up of ruptures and continuities, like his program.
The apparent ruptures are multiple, including in the relationship to the history of the left. “How to do it? », text of theoretical, programmatic and strategic reflection presented by the management of La France insoumise, in February 2026, underlines this. He announces that the old forms of organization are outdated, that the traditional modes of operation of the left have failed, that the old references to the people are no longer effective.
A new modernity
Consequently, the Insoumis movement must propose new forms of organization which involve social networks, direct communication, the unification of all forms of struggle.
The reflection of the Insoumise management accompanies the draft of the program, some of the broad outlines of which were formulated in Saint-Denis, which partly takes up the programmatic elements defined in 2016 in the Future in Common.
On the economic and social level, in addition to the adjustments linked to economic developments, the program, still in the process of being partially redeveloped, defines economic objectives which are in line with the classics of part of the left.
It recalls the final objectives of the first socialists, “to each according to their means, to each according to their needs”. To achieve this, it defines ecological planning. Planning has been part of the identity of the history of the left since the 1930s, but not in its Soviet dimension – planning developed in socialist and non-communist trade union circles. The partial rupture is linked to the importance given to the ecological and digital dimensions, which endorses a new modernity unimaginable a few decades ago.
A buried dimension, communalism
On the political level, Mélenchon advocates a decentralized movement in apparent break with the history of the left which has often acted within the framework of a centralized nation-state (and in obvious break with the centralization of power at LFI). It is in fact part of a continuity with another buried dimension, communalism.
It is partly inspired by the decisions of the Paris Commune of 1871 updated by the libertarian thinker Murray Bookchin that La France insoumise regularly uses while assigning the communes a new decision-making role, while the libertarians only see them as autonomous structures. The municipalities are the cornerstone of the other political dimension of the program, the “Citizens’ Revolution”.
This institutional transformation proposes a change of Republic, inspired by Latin American populism and especially by the Constitution of 1793. It is coupled with a new practice inspired by the beginnings of direct action unionism, the revocability of mandates, breaking with the traditional institutional framework, thereby defining the new France both political and social.
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