Journalist banned, attacks on former NFP partners... La France Insoumise organizes a back-to-school season against everyone

Charles Consigny is stuck in traffic and the Insoumis are growing impatient. In the Louise-Michel amphitheater, this Friday, August 22, the former "Les Républicains" (LR) candidate for the legislative elections in Yvelines is due to cross swords with Manuel Bompard , national coordinator of LFI.

Minutes tick by, still nothing, damn traffic. So, we warm up as best we can. There's a lot of discussion, especially among journalists, these "members" of a "system" , this "elite" who have the movement "in their heads" .

They should be seen, they say, portraying comrades as "sectarians hypnotized" by "the old man," as two sixty-year-old activists lament to one of these journalists. And then there's singing, a lot. The Internationale, of course, but also a few nasty things.

Against a communist, Fabien Roussel , and the socialists as a whole. Their common point: "everyone hates them," they cheerfully intone. It doesn't matter that only a few months ago, they all presented themselves to the French under a single label: the New Popular Front (NFP).

Times change, often too quickly. La France Insoumise and its founder, Jean-Luc Mélenchon , are an illustration of this. In 2010, in the essay "Let them all go" , he brandished all his ambitions for the press and the freedom he cherished.

"We have the right and even the duty to get involved," he wrote then, "it is impossible to lead a citizens' revolution without it entering fully into the media to emancipate them."

Fifteen years later, in 2025, the Amfis, LFI's annual event, created a stir by obstructing its exercise: a refusal of accreditation to a journalist from Le Monde . The fault of the journalist in question, Olivier Pérou: having written a critical investigative book on his training ( La Meute , co-written with Charlotte Bélaïch, journalist at Libération ). Methods denounced by several journalists present, from AFP, Mediapart or l'Humanité, in a press release published on X. "It is not acceptable for a political party to choose its journalists," we can read there.

During his speech at the very end of the day, Jean-Luc Mélenchon went even further, denouncing the "media class" three times, in particular the newspaper Libération, which was guilty of demonizing LFI on a whole range of issues. This despite "the absolute intellectual triumph of the rebels," particularly on international issues.

Not all journalists are being vilified, however: seventy of them, from all over the world, are present, he says. "Let's thank the news professionals ," he smiles to an amused audience. "Because it helps us more than it harms us."

As for the political partners of the rebels, the tone is not much calmer. At midday, the vice-president of the National Assembly, Clémence Guetté, accused the Socialist Party (PS) as Place publique, the movement of Raphaël Glucksmann , whose "habit of renunciations and betrayals is not a page turned."

But also the communists, in particular Fabien Roussel, again booed by the audience for his "discourse on work" which would impose a "grid which hierarchizes (...) those who work and those on assistance" .

Others, unidentified, are accused of conducting a particularly "white" and "old-fashioned" "worker analysis" , in addition to going down the wrong path by focusing on certain "territorial" explanations. One thinks of a former rebel: François Ruffin.

So many forces which, according to her, represent a "left which balks at a minimum of theorization" in order to move towards a "dual materialist and intersectional approach" which France Insoumise would strive to make its own.

On the left, only the Greens were spared. Among the few members of the other NFP parties present, two sit in the Green group in the National Assembly: Sandrine Rousseau, on Thursday, and Benjamin Lucas, this Friday. 2027 is not so far away, but the divisions have never been so visible .

"We will always be on the side of the solution. We have always been on the side of the solution! " Jean-Luc Mélenchon defended himself on the subject, provoking cheers from the crowd. "But there is one thing we will not do, and that is to cheat. We will not cut a single line of the program and your applause is a political mandate that you are giving us!"

Should this be seen as a definitive promise of going it alone? In any case, before all this, he announces other events: the day of mobilization on September 10 , which the FI intends to "support." And the "fall of François Bayrou," which it intends to bring about. His arms alone will not be enough, however.