French Protests Shrink as Mélenchon Pushes ‘New Collectivism’ at Paris Rally

PARIS—Turnout fell sharply on Nov. 7 in France’s fourth consecutive Saturday of demonstrations, with 146,000 people marching nationwide, according to the Interior Ministry, as far-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon gathered more than 20,000 supporters at an exhibition center in Le Bourget, north of Paris, to present his France Unbowed platform for the 2027 presidential election.

The ministry counted 46,000 marchers in Paris and 141 actions across the country, down from 320,000 participants on Oct. 31, 410,000 on Oct. 24, and 550,000 on Oct. 17. The coalition of left-wing youth unions that called the protest put the figure at 250,000, including 75,000 in the capital.

“I’m here because I want to keep the pressure on the government. But a lot of our other friends went to the France Unbowed rally instead,” Charlotte, a 22-year-old sociology student who attended with a few friends and who gave only her first name, told The Epoch Times.

Lucas, 19, who gave only his first name, said several of his friends had decided to sit this one out, having already marched on Nov. 5.

“We’ve shown everyone that we aren’t running out of steam after weeks of this, so you can afford to skip one now and then,” he told The Epoch Times.

On Nov. 9, Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu will host unions and employers at a “social conference” on wages and purchasing power, which the union coalition says will determine the next steps of the movement to protest the high cost of living and public-service cuts.

Police had made 232 arrests by 6 p.m., and nearly 40,000 people underwent preventive checks on routes into city centers. The ministry reported clashes in Toulouse, Grenoble, Marseille, Nantes, Lyon, Bordeaux, Strasbourg, and Dijon, where groups of several hundred radical and far-left activists tried to break into restricted perimeters and pelted officers with projectiles and firework mortars.

Many marches had not been declared and were less supervised by the unions than in previous weeks, the ministry said. Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez condemned “violence that nothing could justify.”

On X, he also condemned “the extraordinary violence that our law enforcement officers face all too often” after a police officer’s home in Auch, in southwestern France, was deliberately set on fire in the early hours of the morning and completely destroyed.

“Everything suggests that this intolerable criminal act was committed because of the officer’s profession,” he wrote.

‘To Arms!’

In Paris, protesters had gathered at the Place de la République by 2 p.m., some carrying Antifa and Palestinian flags. When the march set off, the monument at the center of the square had been covered in graffiti, including pro-Marxist, anti-Israel, and anti-police graffiti.

The placards across Paris called for insurrection.

“No, I am not calling for calm at all,” one read.

Another read, “If we are going to end up in flames, we might as well take them with us.”

Marchers chanted “Paris, suburbs, antifa!”; “Paris, rise up!”; “To arms!”; and “Down with the state, the cops, and the fascists.”

Violence broke out as soon as the march reached the Place de la Nation, where protesters set objects on fire and confronted riot police. The ministry said the Paris march itself had been calm but that “risk groups” caused numerous incidents during the dispersal.

A ‘New Collectivism’

A few miles to the north, Mélenchon addressed a crowd that organizers put at more than 20,000 to launch France Unbowed’s new edition of “L’Avenir en commun” (“A Shared Future”), a 212-page program released the day before with 1,069 measures, according to his party.

The leader of France Unbowed opened his speech on the topic of racism.

“All of you, make racism a personal matter,” he told the crowd. “Once in power, we will hunt down racism with a fine-tooth comb, by all legal means, by all the means already provided for, and by those we will add to them. Structures under influence will be methodically decontaminated from floor to ceiling.”

An Ifop poll for The News Channel, published on Nov. 3, puts Mélenchon second with 17.5 percent to 18 percent support, far behind Marine Le Pen at 35 percent to 37 percent, which would send him to a runoff for the first time in four attempts. The same polls show him losing heavily to Le Pen in the second round.

The rally was held two days after half of the French Communist Party deputies in the National Assembly signed a declaration backing Mélenchon even though party leader Fabien Roussel is running in the election.

“[I’m] very moved to find myself shoulder to shoulder with the communist group, at our side in the fight to lift the left into the second round in 2027,” Mélenchon said.

Mélenchon said he was running to win and suggested that the repeated predictions of his defeat in a second round might be a tactic designed to hold down his score in the first, pointing to recent election results elsewhere in the world.

“The struggle pays off! [Viktor] Orbán was beaten in Hungary! [Aleksandar] Vučić was beaten in Serbia! [President Donald] Trump was beaten in the United States of America. [Flávio] Bolsonaro was beaten in Brazil! Long live [Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva]!” he said, four days after Democrats won control of both houses of Congress in the U.S. midterm elections.

A friend of Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Mélenchon received his formal endorsement during the 2022 French presidential campaign.

Mélenchon’s concept of New France emphasizes the idea of a France that is shaped by the waves of immigration of recent decades, coming mainly from North and sub-Saharan Africa.

In the preamble to his program, Mélenchon wrote that “the time has come for a new collectivism, a fiscal revolution, and an ambitious productive pact.”

The collectivist rhetoric follows political controversy over private property.

“Private property is a freedom that has its limit,” Mélenchon said in late October on a TF1 podcast hosted by economic journalist François Lenglet, prompting accusations from the right that he was preparing requisitions.

Mélenchon’s program was sharply criticized by Le Pen, who denounced it on X as “a project to dismantle France.”

“It takes to its logical conclusion the deconstruction that Emmanuel Macron has pursued since coming to power,” she wrote.

Against Washington, Toward Beijing

Mélenchon, who has previously voiced support for socialist regimes, including those of China, Cuba, and Venezuela, is also openly hostile to the United States.

“By aligning itself with the United States, the French government allowed a genocide to be committed in Gaza,” the “A Shared Future” document states, denouncing “Europe’s voluntary servitude to Washington.”

U.S. President Donald Trump embodies “a new age of imperialism,” the text continues.

“[He] extorts a tribute from his ‘allies’ and is pursuing a strategy of generalized war to counter the place taken by China in globalized capitalism,” it states.

France Unbowed has also sought closer ties with Beijing. In June 2025, a parliamentary report by its lawmaker Sophia Chikirou, widely regarded as the party’s de facto deputy leader, called for a “renewed Euro-Chinese rapprochement,” describing communist China as an “indispensable partner” as part of an “alter-globalist” vision. It contends that describing the Chinese regime as a “dictatorship” is “factually incorrect.”

In its program, France Unbowed says Mélenchon’s government would “work toward the formation of a new alter-globalist alliance” and “strengthen the ‘Rejectionist Front’ against the United States’ warmongering strategy.”

NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte in March backed the U.S. strikes in February to take out Tehran’s military capabilities. Iran is “very close” to having the capability to bomb European cities, Rutte told CBS News in March after the UK government confirmed an attempted Iranian missile strike on Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, home to a UK military base.