On Monday, April 22, on Paris' rue Saint-Guillaume, a welcoming committee awaited Jean-Luc Mélenchon with bated breath. Campaigning for the European elections, the founder of La France Insoumise (LFI, radical left) was due to hold a conference for the students of the prestigious social sciences university Sciences Po. Activists from the far-right Nemesis collective had come to hold signs marked "Headscarf = submission" and chant "Everybody hates Islamists" along with the National Interuniversity Union, a radical right-wing youth organization. Facing them, LFI activists, equipped with purple flags, responded with "Down with the fascists!"
Tucked away from the tensions, the atmosphere in the Boutmy lecture hall was quite different. Nearly 800 students – a figure communicated by the LFI Youth of Sciences Po, who organized the event – welcomed the three-time presidential candidate with thunderous applause.
The student association had been dreaming of hosting their leader for months. A first meeting had been scheduled for October 2023, but it was canceled on the advice of the Paris Prefecture, which cited security risks. This time, the prefect, Laurent Nuñez, considered that there was no need for a ban. This did not prevent Mélenchon from "thanking the management of Sciences Po," who "did not give in to pressure."
This was a direct reference to the three conferences of his at universities that had been canceled in recent months: In Bordeaux, in October; in Rennes, on April 10; and above all in Lille, eight days later. It was on this occasion that the LFI founder returned to his excessive language, comparing the president of the University of Lille to the Nazi Adolf Eichmann, one of the main perpetrators of the Holocaust.
An insulting parallel that caused a stir among the political set. Speaking on news channel BFM-TV on Monday, Communist party leader Fabien Roussel deemed Mélenchon "undefendable." "His excessive comments discredit everything else," added Roussel, who has also been on the receiving end of such comparisons in the past. In September 2023, LFI MP Sophia Chikirou, who has been intimately involved with Mélenchon, compared him to the Nazi collaborator Jacques Doriot.
At Sciences Po on Monday evening, it was no longer a time for ranting. Standing before the students in this temple of the French political elite, Mélenchon played the old wise man, adopting a soothing, professor-like tone and making countless references to Kant, the stoic philosophers and Colette Audry, a French playwright and activist who was close to Simone de Beauvoir.
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