These 12 simultaneous meetings brought together more than 20,000 people according to LFI, in cities chosen to crisscross the territory, from Pau to Besançon, from Nice to Le Havre via Narbonne.

The evening was thought to be the apogee of the campaign organization of La France insoumise, which crushed competition on the left and kept alive its hopes of a qualification in the second round, even if Marine Le Pen is well ahead of Jean-Luc Mélenchon in all the polls in second place.

Campaign director Manuel Bompard and organizer Bastien Lachaud breathed a sigh of relief at the end of the meeting: "Tonight was a technical gamble with 1,000 people involved, everything worked".

And a huge clamor from the Lille public accompanied the appearance, on the screen, of the 11 other rooms, where the hologram of the candidate just mounted on stage appeared.

LFI activists at the meeting of Jean-Luc Mélenchon in Lille, April 5, 2022 EMMANUEL DUNAND AFP

The clamor had been just as loud a few minutes earlier when the northern deputy Adrien Quatennens had launched in the preamble to the room: "I think of you all when the face of Jean-Luc Mélenchon will appear for the second round".

Andréa Escoute, 20, with a degree in political science, is precisely one of those who ended up deciding to vote for the Insoumis, although she is rather a social democrat at heart: "I am happy that Jean- Luc Mélenchon goes up. In my bachelor's degree, we were all disappointed with the state of the left, things are better even if we are not all convinced by him. We discussed it and we are going to mobilize so as not to end up with Marine Le Pen in the second round."

She is angry with the rest of the left, she told AFP: "It can kick them, you see how it can do when we've been working?"

An executive from Anne Hidalgo's campaign recognized him on Tuesday, "Mélenchon had been in combat for five years, he prepared himself, he has the job, the charisma, the oratorical force, and his party he does not started only for him, not for the intermediate elections".

"Neoliberal Hallucination"

The tribune himself threw all his strength into his last meeting, delivering one of the longest and most spirited speeches of his campaign, evoking "the great wheel of history and its gears".

Jean-Luc Mélenchon at an electoral meeting in Lille, April 5, 2022 Emmanuel DUNAND AFP

There are "three days" of campaigning left, he exclaimed: "Right now we feel our destiny at our fingertips, we can carry the most incredible political bifurcation!"

Bifurcation to move away from "neoliberal hallucination", to "break economically with this crazy system which wants to transform everything into merchandise", and to reconnect with "long time".

Jean-Luc Mélenchon warned that "it can be played out for not much".

So to hope to overtake the far-right candidate, he pounded Marine Le Pen, addressing his "angry but not fascist" voters.

“How can you carry someone so far removed from your basic life concerns?” thundered the tribune, saying he wanted to “put an end to this mystification”.

For example, during the parliamentary debate on the pension reform, between the end of 2019 and the beginning of 2020, "her name does not appear once in the reports on the pension reform, she did not get involved. one second, never!"

Jean-Luc Mélenchon also delivered a summary of his program, focusing in particular on the "feminist revolution", a sequence which caused several of the most enthusiastic cheers from the crowd.

And while delivering a kind of assessment of his career, recalling that the rebellious succession was assured with his young and numerous lieutenants, he motivated his troops to convince the undecided: “We still have three days (...). feel with delicacy but strength that everyone is responsible, individually, personally, for what will happen".

© 2022 AFP