“Jean-Luc Mélenchon pulled off an extraordinary PR coup,” said Pascal Perrineau, a professor of political science at Sciences-Po Paris. “Asking the French to elect him prime minister might sound absurd, but it was an extremely shrewd strategy. It allowed him to both supplant Le Pen as Macron’s chief opponent and cast himself as the pillar of a revamped left.”
The PR stunt was soon followed by another tour de force, which even critics have hailed as a masterstroke. In the days following Macron’s re-election, Mélenchon and his team engineered what many had come to see as an impossible feat: a broad alliance of France’s deeply fractured left, united around a common policy platform and fielding a single candidate in each of France’s 577 constituencies.