Paris (AFP)

"Common causes" rather than "conflictuality": Jean-Luc Mélenchon has been striving for a few weeks to give a unifying image by proposing solutions to the crisis, a way of putting himself in the suit of the presidential candidate of 2022.

From the start of the health crisis, the dilemma was daunting for opponents: how to exist in front of the government without passing for an opportunist troublemaker? The leader of La France insoumise had first made strong remarks, having regard to his usual virulence, to ask his troops to "follow the instructions".

On April 6 in a blog post entitled "Acting in politics now", he then confided the evolution of his strategy. "In ordinary times, conflict produces consciousness," he said. "The action to spread our ideas is then based on focusing on specific conflicts whose content and forms represent examples to follow".

Jean-Luc Mélenchon had put this approach into practice during the "yellow vests" crisis, then during the conflict over pension reform. "This is not how our field of action looks at the moment," he writes now. "This particular moment must be more dedicated to creating" common causes "than to triggering particular zones of conflict."

The president of the Insoumis group in the National Assembly gives, in a certain way, the point to the member Clémentine Autain who, after the failed European elections in May 2019 (6.3%), had demanded rhetoric based on hope rather than anger.

The deputy Alexis Corbière, close to Jean-Luc Mélenchon, explains to AFP that while the "dislocation of the country" is on the watch, "we must take a higher step": "We must speak to the country because the period will mark the whole sequence that follows, what has been said will have an importance in future deadlines. "

- Mitterrand and Trotsky -

Example: the relationship with employers, usually vilified by the radical left. The rebels have sworn for a few days that business leaders must be consulted and that Medef has given signs of cooperation.

"I'm not telling you that I'm going to do it now, I'm telling you what we would do if we were in power," Jean-Luc Mélenchon said on LCI on Sunday.

Already a candidate in 2022? "I wish our ideas were, and he is the most experienced and the most qualified among us", breathes Alexis Corbière.

But this new step is not a break in the career of the former senator, minister and presidential candidate, who seems to swing between two models, the "quiet force" and unifier of François Mitterrand and the revolutionary impulse of Leon Trotsky.

Result, "he changes lines with each election," mocks an environmentalist. "He is the great teacher of an ecological and social Republic as in 2012 and 2017", prefers to retain Alexis Corbière.

Present in the tight "commando" that campaigned for Mr. Mélenchon in 2017, the former national speaker of La France rebellious François Cocq, since excluded, doubts the viability of the method. "By trying over time to reconcile the two approaches" of gathering and cleavage, "he loses on both counts", he analyzes.

According to François Cocq, the decision to preside over itself imposed itself: "If Jean-Luc Mélenchon had said that the crisis was bringing us into a phase of dismissal (of the elites), he would also have been swept away because he represents the old world to people. "

Instead, the leader of the rebels flows in the wake of the work-study candidate.

© 2020 AFP