Escalating Attacks

Mélenchon said the language in the graffiti was nothing new.

“I recognized the slogans,” Mélenchon said at the rally the Thursday after the break-in.

It was the same sort of language fascist militants used when they attacked a France Insoumise meeting in Bordeaux in 2022 wearing ski masks and carrying crowbars. There, they chanted “Everybody hates leftists” and carried a poster that read “Send them back to Africa.”

It’s also the same sort of language France Insoumise politicians like Louis Boyard heard after having his address circulate among fascist groups. He’s had to move twice since being elected to the National Assembly in 2022.

“I’ve been followed and had my movements tracked,” Boyard wrote in a statement at the beginning of 2024 after a video went viral of a man insulting him on a train. “My family has been directly threatened several times.”

At the rally after the break-in, Mélenchon said that he knows he’s not the first person to ever have their home broken into. Anybody who’s ever been burgled, he said, can understood what it feels like.

“Living through this type of attack always feels like a profanation,” Mélenchon said.

But he also made the point that the attacks on him were part of a trend that he accused the police of doing little to address. He said that over the past year there have been voicemails and anonymous tracts left with threatening messages, and pointed to a series of developed assassination plots against him over the years, which have come out in the press — often before he’d ever been informed about them.

“I know this isn’t going to end well,” he said a couple of times at the Thursday meeting. “All this is going to end badly, I don’t know when.”

“The bottom line is that none of us feel like we’re protected by the police or the courts,” he elaborated in his blog, lamenting the fact that 90 percent of referrals they make to the police end up in acquittals, if they go anywhere at all.

He also said that media demonization of France Insoumise makes such attacks on him inevitable.

“I don’t know who to attribute [this attack] to from the group of fascist and supremacist groups who have been hunting so many of us for months,” Mélenchon wrote on his blog. But he said that he’d already seen the stuff the fascists who hunt him are made of, during the court proceedings after the assassination plots against him.

“They’re puppets, hallucinating and stuffed ideologically with racist and supremacist clichés,” he wrote. “But the strings they’re manipulated by go all the way back up to the fingers of those who are creating the ambiance which pushes them toward these crimes.”

After the attack was publicized, there was a spate of condemnations, including one from Marine Le Pen.

“The intrusion into and damage done to Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s personal home are completely unacceptable types of behavior,” Le Pen wrote on Twitter. “I hope that everything is done to find those responsible for carrying out this deeply cowardly act, and I give my support to Mr. Mélenchon, who’s a victim.”

But at the Thursday rally, Mélenchon said Le Pen’s words ring hollow, especially in light of revelations a few days before about a Rassemblement National group on Facebook where people posted things like “Hitler chose the wrong ethnic group to exterminate” over a photo of a woman wearing a veil, and called for game hunters to turn their guns on inner-city projects.

The group isn’t an official party Facebook group, and none of the offensive posts highlighted in a report by Les Jours were made by Rassemblement National officials. But fifteen current MPs for the party were members of the group under their personal Facebook accounts. And many of those MPs had posted in the group during their careers as party activists, and even in their capacity as party officials. Alexandre Loubet, an MP who is also a special councillor to the party’s prime-ministerial candidate Jordan Bardella, posted in the group eighty times in 2023. Alexandre Sabatou, another current MP, posted thirty times over 2023 and 2024.

Mélenchon called for the MPs in the Facebook group to be expelled from Le Pen’s party, saying that it was unlikely they were unaware of the death threats and racist attacks being posted in it. He said it was unacceptable for France Insoumise legislators to have work alongside racists like them in the National Assembly.

He also accused anybody indifferent to the break-in of helping “unleash feeble monsters,” pointing to the clearly political nature of the attack, and said that the continued lack of a response to these attacks will only empower the people behind them.

“Each case of impunity strengthens their arrogance,” he added.

Ominous

The international press is quick to condemn such impunity when it comes to centrist or conservative politicians being accosted by rowdy protesters, or overheated opposition politicians who frame live political questions in stark moral terms.

There’s been a drumbeat of these sorts of condemnations, of “violence” against politicians and political life itself, over the past year, particularly as opposition to Israel’s genocide against Palestine mounts.

They’re frequently attended by warnings that the situation today is more dangerous than it’s ever been. Reuters, for example, reported breathlessly in February 2024 that more than ten British lawmakers were fearing for their lives after various confrontations and heated arguments with anti-genocide protesters. The group of MPs, who all spoke anonymously to the news bureau, told Reuters that strident criticisms from their constituents equaled abuse that they worried could escalate into violence.

But when it came to an actual escalation into violence against a politician over his beliefs, there hasn’t been a word about the attack on Mélenchon. The last time he was mentioned by Reuters — aside from a brief report about his comments following Jean-Marie Le Pen’s death this Tuesday — was in a December 6 article where you can read about how the ominous-sounding “firebrand leader” of France Insoumise “slammed” the Socialist Party president Olivier Faure for daring to talk to Emmanuel Macron.

The Associated Press was also mum. There, the last we hear from Mélenchon is in a December 12 article about negotiations on a new government, with word that Mélenchon’s “hard-left” party had been excluded from the talks.

In fact, outside of a December 22 article from the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS), I was unable to find a single publication in the Anglophone press that mentioned that France’s leading left-wing politician had his home broken into by a Nazi gang. WSWS has no affection for him, but at least condemned the attack, identifying it “aim[ed] through him to intimidate all left-wing opposition in the working class.”

For over a decade, Mélenchon has been accused of “brutalizing” the public debate. The accusations have ranged from his rhetoric destroying the honor of the entire left to responsibility for riots in 2023 in response to the police killing of a seventeen-year-old.

The French media’s attacks on Mélenchon are par for the course, and for the international press there’s no expectation that they should follow his every movement. But next time you hear that a politician is “under attack” for their views, think about what that actually means, and whether you’re worried about it ending badly for them. For Mélenchon, it might.