How anti-Semitism migrated to the left: Jean-Luc Mélenchon has chosen Jew-hatred as a political vehicle

If there were a French Trump, one would immediately recognize him in the features of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who is also an heir to Jean-Marie Le Pen: angry, disruptive, always volcanic. His face twists into an angry grimace as he urges the masses to adore him, never tolerating the slightest curbing of his power. He lacks only Trump's involuntary sense of humor and his inordinate appetite for money.

The fate of this socialist apparatchik, who exemplifies Nietzsche's thesis of ressentiment, is strange: A former Trotskyist and member of the sectarian Communist Internationalist organization, he spent 30 years in the Socialist Party without finding a place or rank that matched his ambitions. In 2000, he was given only a meager post as Secretary of State for Vocational Training in Lionel Jospin's government, which led him to first found the Parti de Gauche and, a few years later, La France Insoumise (LFI).

Mélenchon is the epitome of the rejected suitor, first by François Mitterrand, whom he idolized, and then by Lionel Jospin. Both politicians respected him but considered him unsuitable for higher positions and uncontrollable. How could this talented orator, who advocated a Bolivarian coalition of left-leaning Castro countries in Latin America – Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela – slip into a red-brown position and sympathize with the theses of the far right?

The answer is difficult; in short, it is undoubtedly opportunism. With unparalleled intuition, Mélenchon quickly recognized that the left's potential for renewal no longer lies with the white, conservative sections of the population, but with children of Arab-Muslim migrant backgrounds.

His stance on the headscarf is symptomatic of this change. Until 2019, he vehemently rejected the hijab, calling it a "piece of cloth" and a provocation against the republic. After the terrorist attacks of 2015, he declared the term "Islamophobia" unsuitable in a tweet: "You have the right not to like Islam, just as you have the right not to like Catholicism." He even added: "It is a big mistake to confuse Islamophobia with racism, and you have the right, and sometimes even the duty, to criticize religions mercilessly."

That changed in 2019, when he participated with Salafist organizations in a demonstration against the stigmatization of Muslims in France after the mosque in Bayonne was machine-gunned by an 84-year-old, mentally disturbed right-wing extremist. From that point on, his attitude toward Israel and the Jews in France would change fundamentally, although it is unclear whether this was a return of the repressed or cynical pragmatism.

Mélenchon followed the analysis of political scientist Pascal Boniface, who estimated at the beginning of the century that there were 5 to 6 million Muslims and only 500,000 Jews in France. Boniface argued that the left's interest should lie in appealing to the potentially largest voting groups. Mélenchon adopts this view, thus continuing the old tradition of left-wing antisemitism.

The founding of the State of Israel in 1948 provided the ideological pretext for this: Jews were transformed from deportees into soldiers, from stateless people into militarized settlers forced to share the same land with another people. The Six-Day War gave the European far left the opportunity to align themselves with Palestinian organizations and the supposedly oppressed Muslims, the new damned of this earth.

In 1972, the attack on the Israeli delegation at the Munich Olympic Games was celebrated by many revolutionary activists, among them the Trotskyist Edwy Plenel, for whom no words were harsh enough for the victims (something he later regretted). In 1975, the UN passed a resolution declaring "Zionism a form of racism." The resolution sparked controversy and was ultimately annulled in 1991. But the poisonous debate had begun and continued.

For the powers in the Maghreb and the Middle East, Zionism is a modern version of imperialism and fascism. The Jewish state becomes a convenient scapegoat for the misery and frustrations in the Arab world: "Rejection of Israel is the most powerful aphrodisiac for Muslims," ​​said the late Moroccan King Hassan II. This anti-Zionism also allows part of Europe to absolve itself of its past transgressions against Judaism.

Israel and its Zionist supporters in Europe are now perversely being denounced on anti-racist grounds: Hatred of Jews has become virtuous. As if the descendants of concentration camp prisoners were now equal to the executioners who gassed their fathers. And no crime is too absurd to be blamed on Zionism: it created Hitler out of nothing, it invented the myth of the Holocaust to turn it into a lucrative business. But it is also said to be responsible for September 11 in New York, the 2004 tsunami, the October 7 pogrom in southern Israel , and for the invention of the HIV virus and the coronavirus.

The Jewish state, a nation of outcasts, gradually became, in the eyes of its critics, the outcast of nations. The Jews, once exemplary victims, have lost this title to the Palestinians, whose beatification process has been tirelessly pursued for half a century. In the eyes of its critics, Israel is doubly guilty: as a Western appendage entrenched in the Middle East, it conceals its territorial claim, and under the guise of an insurmountable injustice, genocide, it is now itself committing genocide in Gaza.

Gaza is being called a "new Auschwitz" by the left. Hatred of the West, on both sides of the Atlantic, is now expressed, especially after October 7, 2023, through hatred of the Jews. This makes them the emblematic community of the West, after having been its scapegoat for centuries.

Jean-Luc Mélenchon was less the initiator than the catalyst of this reversal. But he pursued it with a zeal that defies all caution. Mélenchon, who sees himself as the French Che Guevara or Castro, is more reminiscent of Jacques Doriot, the former communist tribune. In 1934, Stalin denied him the post of First Secretary of the French Communist Party in favor of Maurice Thorez, whereupon he collaborated with the Germans. He died in early 1945 wearing a Waffen-SS uniform, perhaps the victim of a Nazi reckoning.

Antisemitism, a passion of the nationalist right, has crossed over into the camp of the postcolonial and woke left. The great challenge of any political struggle is not to resemble one's enemy. LFI, which denounces the far right in every sentence and denigrates its smallest opponents as Nazis, has itself become a fascist party of the far left.

Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a great admirer of Xi Jinping, Putin, Castro, and Assad, has thus fallen into anti-Semitism. In April 2025, journalists Olivier Pérou and Charlotte Belaïch published a book about LFI, "La Meute" (The Mob), in which they analyze the Mélenchon system, which operates with threats, harassment, sexist and sexual violence, and opaque financing.

Mélenchon has only one word to describe the authors of this investigation: "des dégénérés" (degenerates). The term is apt at a time when an exhibition on art considered degenerate by the Nazis is taking place at the Picasso Museum. Charlotte Belaïch, a journalist at "Libération" and a Sephardic Jew, has since received a barrage of anti-Semitic messages. The circle has closed.

Pascal Bruckner is a philosopher and writer. He lives in Paris. – Translated from French.