France’s far-left presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon brought two students onto the stage of his presidential campaign rally on Sunday, 11 October, where they demanded a ‘general mobilization’ as France reels from weeks of riots, arson and attacks on police. Before around 10,000 supporters in Clermont-Ferrand, the far-left leader praised the students and promoted his vision of a Sixth Republic built for what he calls the ‘New France’.
Mélenchon praised the protesters’ ‘very great political and trade-union maturity’, promised to abolish the Parcoursup university admissions platform and reiterated his demand to lower the voting age to 16. The students insisted that they were not being manipulated by Mélenchon or his party, France Unbowed (LFI).
At the same rally, he outlined his plan to replace the Fifth Republic with a Sixth Republic, tied to his vision of a ‘New France’ shaped by mass immigration and ‘creolization’ rather than traditional French assimilation and national identity. Arguing that the country’s demographic and cultural transformation requires a new political order, he proposed a sweeping constitutional overhaul, including citizens’ referendums and the power to recall elected officials, alongside expanded welfare and ecological regionalization.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon on X (formerly Twitter): “Nous allons fonder la 6e République, celle du pouvoir populaire, avec le référendum citoyen et le référendum révocatoire pour mettre dehors ceux dont on ne veut plus.Nous allons avancer aux frontières de l’humanité, en mer, dans l’espace, dans le numérique et dans la… pic.twitter.com/uvVxlJcCoR / X”
Nous allons fonder la 6e République, celle du pouvoir populaire, avec le référendum citoyen et le référendum révocatoire pour mettre dehors ceux dont on ne veut plus.Nous allons avancer aux frontières de l’humanité, en mer, dans l’espace, dans le numérique et dans la… pic.twitter.com/uvVxlJcCoR
His agenda places the immigrant-background communities from which the student unrest initially emerged at the centre of his proposed transformation of France. The clearly anti-white racial dimension of his ‘New France’ vision is reflected in both his own remarks and statements by other LFI officials.
Bally Bagayoko, the party’s mayor of Saint-Denis, has repeatedly denounced what he described as the ‘white norm of power’, while Mélenchon himself provoked outrage in March by mocking people as ‘all white, all ugly’ during a speech celebrating Bagayoko’s election victory as proof that France was already transforming towards his dystopian concept.
The protests themselves began in September over teacher shortages, overcrowding and deteriorating schools in Créteil, in Paris’s heavily immigrant-background suburbs. LFI rapidly moved to the forefront of the mobilization, with senior figures Clémence Guetté, Louis Boyard and Mathilde Panot supporting school blockades. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu has accused the party and its ultra-left allies of fuelling the disorder for political gain, an accusation LFI denies. Former LFI parliamentary aide Ritchy Thibault was nevertheless arrested in Saint-Denis after urging protesters to build barricades, attack police stations and ‘set fire to the Élysée’.
The scale of the violence increased significantly last week. By 8 October, 6,877 people had been placed in police custody, 86 per cent of them minors, while 2,376 faced prosecution. Earlier figures recorded 761 injured police officers and 215 injured students, while at least 24 schools suffered serious damage. Rioters have also burned barricades, vandalized businesses and assaulted officers. Nationwide demonstrations drew 71,500 participants on 8 October, with another mobilization scheduled for 13 October.
The student protests, increasingly co-opted by the far left, have also spread to neighbouring Belgium’s French-speaking Wallonia. In Liège, police recorded 194 arrests—including 114 minors—and 43 injured officers by 8 October, following arson, damaged shopfronts and attacks on police. Socialist mayor Willy Demeyer banned unauthorized public gatherings of more than three people until 16 October.
‘Mélenchon is seeking to channel the unrest into his presidential campaign’
As in France, the communist Workers’ Party of Belgium (PTB) has backed the protests, with materials from its RedFox youth network appearing among demonstrators. Interior Minister Bernard Quintin accused Antifa militants of infiltrating the protests and exploiting children for political purposes.
While police across France and Belgium struggle to contain the violence, Mélenchon is seeking to channel the unrest into his presidential campaign and broader project of political transformation. At Clermont-Ferrand, it became clear that, no matter how many more people are detained or injured, or how many more schools are set ablaze, LFI intends to continue coordinating and mobilizing around the unrest, with Mélenchon’s ‘New France’ as the ultimate prize of the glorious revolution floating before their eyes.
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