“Le Monde” of Today
Returning to Paris in October after a two-year absence, I was eager to read the printed press. Holding a French newspaper in my hands, sitting outdoors at a convivial café, was a treat, the antithesis of reading on a screen in my silent office in New York.
The leading story was the spectacular rise of Eric Zemmour and the threat he posed to Marine Le Pen on the right. Until recently, she was seen as the favorite candidate to advance to the second round of voting against the current president, Emmanuel Macron. The paper also printed extensive commentary on the fragmentation and possible downfall of the left. The left-wing heavyweight of the 2017 presidential election, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, had been undercut by the candidacies of socialist Anne Hidalgo, former socialist minister turned independent Arnaud Montebourg, Green Party representative Yannick Jadot, and communist Fabien Roussel.
As a person who leans left, I paid particular attention to my favorite daily newspaper, Le Monde, which historically has also leaned left and is well placed to analyze, with a certain degree of compassion, Mélenchon’s chances against the incumbent, a free-market “liberal” (the term liberal, when applied to a French politician, means a somewhat conservative promoter of capitalism). Five years ago, Mélenchon had garnered 19.58 percent of the vote, almost enough to advance him to the second round against Macron (Le Pen got there with 21.30 percent). But his poll ratings are lower than they were in 2017—at the end of December, about 10 percent —and there have been calls for him to accept the results of a left-wing primary, now underway, that would designate a single “unity” candidate.
But Le Monde was being visibly hostile to Mélenchon, despite his mainly social-democratic and popular positions. The newspaper, founded by a Resistance member out of the ashes of the Vichy government, had issued a genuine barrage of maliciousness that reminded me of the New York Times’s relentlessly negative coverage of Bernie Sanders in the 2020 U.S. presidential campaign. This nasty attitude seems to date back to October 2018, when Mélenchon reacted violently to the police who had come to search his headquarters for evidence of abuse of trust and embezzlement of public funds. “I’m a parliamentarian,” Mélenchon had screamed outside on the street. “La République, c’est moi! My person is sacred…” Was this outburst impulse and political stupidity, or was it a calculated act? It’s hard to know, but the French newspaper of record responded with violence of its own, thundering away in an editorial titled “The Fateful Fury of Jean-Luc Mélenchon,” in which the author wrote, “Here is a man who wants to bring together ‘the people,’ starting with the ones on the left. Yet he breaks down, ‘loses it’ in public, and in short, shows that he doesn’t have the necessary composure to perform the functions to which he aspires.”
Three years later at my café perch on the Left Bank, I read a Le Monde story that was ostensibly reportage but stressed the idea of “the end of a cycle” for Mélenchon and of his supposed wish “that this last presidential campaign be the right one, or at least that it take place without regret.” So is this the end for the old leftist? Apparently. Le Monde’s October 10 editorial on Mélenchon’s and others’ criticisms of polling methods sneered at his persistence and that of another candidate disliked by Le Monde: “After three candidacies, Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon look pretty worn out in their ill-fitting candidate suits.” What does this mean? That it’s too boring for voters and journalists to follow Mélenchon?
Ironically, Le Figaro, the right-wing newspaper that nurtured Zemmour as a columnist, appears to be much friendlier toward Mélenchon than Le Monde. On October 18, ahead of a La France Insoumise (Mélenchon’s party, France Unbowed) rally in Reims, the reporter seemed downright admiring: “Jean-Luc Mélenchon is rarely in better form than when he is holding a big presidential rally. This rally, one of his first of his third campaign, was no exception.” Don’t they agree with Le Monde that a third campaign is one too many? Perhaps someone at Le Figaro remembers that François Mitterrand won the presidency on his third try. Of the same rally, the reporter for Le Monde simply wrote that Mélenchon had “cast a wide net” in his speech.
More recently, Le Monde revealed itself to be remarkably condescending toward Mélenchon. How best to respond to the threat from the extreme right, given the sudden rise of Zemmour, whose level of support verges on 14 percent? To believe Le Monde, it seems like the only person who can counter Zemmour or Le Pen in the second round—and beat Macron—is Valérie Pécresse, the candidate of the center-right party Les Républicans. On December 7, Le Monde’s front page portrayed Pécresse as a potential savior, with a headline and photo at the top of the page and a glaring subtitle: “For Emmanuel Macron’s supporters, the candidate’s standing is concerning.” Mélenchon was mentioned below, under a smaller headline, after appearing before 4,500 supporters under the Great Arch of La Défense the day after Pécresse’s anointment by her party. According to Le Monde, Zemmour, at the same time, “was holding his first rally as a candidate, in a room that was potentially seven times larger” than Mélenchon’s space. “No, France is not the far right,” trumpeted Mélenchon. Le Monde: “Once the rally was over, everyone quieted down” while “Zemmour’s supporters clashed with antiracist militants. Comparatively speaking, things aren’t going all that badly for Jean-Luc Mélenchon.”
Comparatively speaking, there’s something not quite right at Le Monde.
