He fought France's far right for half a century. Now Melenchon's presidential bid may hand it power

LE BOURGET, France (AP) — Young supporters wore his name on their backs like a soccer star’s, above the number 27. They sang about brass bands and revolution. Many had spent the fall protesting or blockading their schools.

Then in walked Jean-Luc Mélenchon : 75 years old, on his fourth presidential run and old enough to be their grandfather.

“I have only one sensible thing to propose,” he told 20,000 supporters in a vast hall north of Paris on Saturday. “Everything must change.”

The septuagenarian may never get another chance. Three presidential bids have ended short of the runoff. In 2022, just 421,308 votes kept him out. Now, riding a surge in support, he is eyeing a winner-take-all showdown with far-right front-runner Marine Le Pen .

The bespectacled, booming and seemingly tireless leftist wants more than the presidency. He wants to rewrite the rules of the French republic — invoking the unfinished promise of the Revolution of 1789.

A place in the May 2 runoff could prove a cruel prize. If Le Pen beats him, the anti-capitalist who has spent half a century fighting the far right could help give it what it has never won: the Elysee Palace — and command of France’s nuclear arsenal.

Victory could send shock waves across the Atlantic. Trump would still be in the White House. Russia is waging war in Ukraine. Yet Mélenchon wants to pull the EU’s only nuclear-armed power out of NATO, starting with its military command. His debt plans could also put France on a collision course with Europe’s central bank, rattling markets.

His detractors see that as the greater danger. They accuse him of stoking unrest and antisemitism, scorning the police and the press, and going soft on Moscow — charges he rejects.

Born in Tangier, Morocco, in 1951, the showman was a Trotskyist student, then a Socialist for three decades, rising to senator and junior minister. In 2008, he walked out to build his own movement.

Even his rallies have a name: the “Mélenshow.” On Saturday, cameras swept over the crowd on cables while a film followed a woman through life’s struggles. One by one, his lieutenants stepped forward with solutions. It was a campaign rally staged as a government in waiting.

Modesty is not his style. Backstage, behind a black curtain, he paused to listen to the roar.

“Enjoy it,” he told French media. “It’s not often in a lifetime that you see something like this.”

He then recalled a 1972 rally when Socialist François Mitterrand and Communist Georges Marchais shared the stage. But this time, Mélenchon boasted, “I’m doing this all by myself!”

He even sniffed at former Socialist President François Hollande, who rallied in the same hall on his way to power: “They only filled a third of the room,” he said.

To some, the boasts had a Trumpian ring: The U.S. president, too, brags about the size of his crowds — and once declared, “I alone can fix it.” One far-right mayor has called Mélenchon “the Donald Trump of the left.”

When police searched his party’s offices in 2018, he bellowed at them: “I am the Republic!” He was later convicted over the confrontation.

A 2025 investigative book described a leader who demands blind devotion and treats doubters as traitors.

His 2027 bet is on the young and the suburbs.

Le Bourget lies in Seine-Saint-Denis, mainland France’s poorest department. To the far right, it symbolizes crime and failed immigration. To Mélenchon — a white veteran of the old Left — it represents the future: a younger, more diverse “New France” whose votes could carry him to power.

The hall fell silent in memory of Pengo Bossio Wangi, a 26-year-old Frenchman of African descent shot dead last month in what the government called a racist terror attack.

Since September, a high school protest movement over crumbling schools and teacher shortages has swept France. Police have made thousands of arrests. Mélenchon embraced it from the start.

“Don’t touch our young people,” he warned the government.

“We are the future, and he listens to us,” said Jamal Santos, 22, a student whose group joined the protests.

Last month, cost-of-living protests turned to looting and arson in more than 20 cities. Rioters torched the 19th-century City Hall in Limoges. Le Pen accused his party of plunging France into chaos. Mélenchon blamed police tactics and denied his party organized the protests.

France’s old political order is coming apart.

The Socialists and conservative Republicans, who traded power for decades, won just 6.5% of the first-round presidential vote between them in 2022.

Now a Le Pen-Mélenchon runoff could leave both parties watching from the sidelines as two movements that have never governed France battle for the presidency.

Mélenchon is racing to bank that energy before mainstream rivals regroup. Center-right former Prime Minister Édouard Philippe is also vying to face Le Pen. If the center unites, or voters rally to block a runoff between the extremes, second place could slip away.

Mélenchon's program, over 1,000 points long, reads like a blueprint for another country. It would lower the voting age to 16, bring back retirement at 60, make the rich pay more and impose a moratorium on artificial intelligence.

At its heart is a new constitution to replace the Fifth Republic that Charles de Gaulle founded in 1958.

He would have a special assembly of citizens, excluding current lawmakers, write a new constitution for voters to approve. And between elections, ordinary French people could gather signatures to force votes to overturn laws, change the constitution or even oust a sitting president.

“We are no longer in 1958,” said Hicham En-Naji, 27.

Few French politicians inspire such devotion, or such fury.

He has made Gaza a rallying cry for the young, insisting Saturday that “genocide must be called genocide.” Activists who accuse him of fanning antisemitism, a charge he denies, disrupted the rally with whistles.

“Some commentators are advising me to tone things down,” he said. “I won’t do that.”

He closed by turning a well-known 2017 gaffe by President Emmanuel Macron about “people who are nothing” into a line from the “Internationale,” the historic anthem of communists and socialists worldwide.

“Macron told you that you are nothing,” he said. “So let us be everything!”

The hall answered, singing “La Marseillaise.”

Whether the teenagers in No. 27 jerseys remember him as the man who finally carried his revolution into the Elysee Palace, or the one who held its door open for the far right, may come down to the one thing he refuses to do: soften.

Associated Press journalist Jade Le Deley contributed to this report.