On Tuesday, tempers again flared in France’s Assemblée nationale. A week after the death of Nahel Merzouk, the seventeen-year-old shot at point-blank range by a police officer last week, the chair of the France Insoumise parliamentary group, Mathilde Panot, had raised a question about the lack of political responses. But Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne responded with a fresh attack on Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s left-wing movement. “You are stepping outside of the bounds of the Republic,” she told France Insoumise MPs.

Since the tragedy in Nanterre on June 27, right-wing criticism targeting France Insoumise has also been increasingly heard within the ranks of broad-left alliance Nouvelle Union Populaire Écologique et Sociale (NUPES). The debate on the realities of police violence in working-class and marginalized neighborhoods, meanwhile, has been completely overshadowed.

In an interview with Mediapart, Jean-Luc Mélenchon analyses the reasons for this turn of events. Behind it, he sees the emergence of an “anti-popular front” — designed to unite the Right and far right while demonizing the people in revolt.