Olivier Besancenot is a postal worker and a member of the leadership of France’s Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste (NPA). He first came to prominence in 2002 when, as an unknown twenty-eight-year old trade union militant, he ran for president as the candidate of the Ligue Communiste Revolutionaire (LCR), and managed to win 1.2 million votes (4.3 percent), including an impressive 14 percent of the youth vote.

In 2007, he again ran for president on the LCR ticket and secured an equally impressive result (1.5 million votes, or just over 4 percent). By 2008, he had become one of France’s best known and most popular political figures: in polls conducted that year, 60 percent of the public expressed a favorable opinion of him, and voters preferred him over most leaders of the more moderate Socialist Party when asked who should be the Left’s standard-bearer in 2012.

In May 2011, however, Besancenot, by then a spokesman for the NPA (into which the LCR was dissolved in 2009) announced that he would not be running for president a third time. Soon afterward, he stepped down from his official role as the public face of the party.