Mélenchon’s “new France” vision triggers fierce cross-party debate

Following the unrest in France this month, the country finds itself split between Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s project of a “new France” and Marine Le Pen’s call for “law and order”.

Triggered alongside the student revolt, the question of national identity has moved to the centre of the presidential race.

“This is Mélenchon’s ‘new France’,” said National Rally (RN) leader Jordan Bardella and Identity and Freedom (ID) party leader Marion Maréchal Le Pen, linking the scenes of violence directly to the phrase.

According to several recent speeches by the leader of France Unbowed (LFI), “new France” signifies a country transformed positively by immigration, women’s rights, shifting family structures, social mobility, and the political demands of younger generations.

Mélenchon contends that this optimistic vision can become a reality if voters elect him president next year.

Two Frances to clash this weekend

Yet as the April 2027 elections draw closer, Mélenchon’s vision of a “new France” has turned into a recurring target for Marine Le Pen’s party, the RN, because it encapsulates a fundamental rift over French identity.

While Le Pen’s party draws on nostalgia for a revived nationalist past, Mélenchon’s vision of a “new France” envisages a clean break with the old order.

These two visions appear set for a direct collision this weekend. Le Pen will stage a gathering in Orléans before 10,000 supporters, which RN officials say will focus on authority, French identity, and public order.

Mélenchon’s party, LFI, is expected to join demonstrations against the RN alongside other left-wing forces and trade unions in the historic French town associated with Joan of Arc, which Le Pen treats as a nationalist symbol.

Echoes of Sartre in “new France”: Change over essentialism

Defending the concept of “new France” against its critics, LFI argues that it cannot be understood without reading a little of the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and grasping the legacy accumulated from the left’s long ideological battles.

From a Sartrean perspective, “new France” is not a fixed, essentialist identity, but a fluid, changing reality.

Rather than declaring “this is who we are”, this outlook is grounded in “this is what we live through”, describing the varied realities confronted by precarious workers, women, people of non-French origin, and young voters.

According to this view, their lived experiences fit neither the right’s nor the left’s traditional national representations.

Mélenchon identifies women as the face of the “new France”. This category also encompasses blended families, young people, LGBT rights, long-distance commuters, and French citizens whose ancestors were born abroad.

Broadsides from the right, criticism from the left

Although he has used the phrase for years, pollsters note that it has become increasingly prominent as identity politics has come to occupy a larger share of his campaigning.

For critics across the political spectrum, “new France” implies casting “old France” aside.

Conservative Bruno Retailleau, for example, describes it as “the end of France”.

Former LFI ally François Ruffin criticises Mélenchon from the left. In Ruffin’s view, the LFI leader is trading class-based political appeal for an appeal directed at diverse urban electorates, sacrificing working-class towns and deindustrialised regions in the process.

Others dismiss the phrase as a slogan fabricated to drive polarisation across every cultural fault line.

Promoting the concept in May ahead of the French municipal elections, Mélenchon said: “The new France is not one part of France set against another; it is the whole of France.”

A month later, he noted that crowds at his rallies chanted “On est chez nous!” or “This is our home!”

Usually associated with far-right gatherings through the variant “France belongs to us”, the slogan, according to Rapporteur, offers a simpler expression of what the two camps are actually contesting: who gets to define French identity, and who feels at home in France.