Alain Finkielkraut: “Mélenchon is Betting on the Great Replacement to Gain Power”

Alain Finkielkraut—one of France’s most distinguished philosophers, polemicists, and public intellectuals—has taken aim at Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the de facto leader of the French Left, accusing him of Islamo-leftism and leveraging the country’s unprecedented demographic shift to ascend to the heights of political power.

In his statements, which came on Tuesday, May 11th during an interview segment with Sonia Marbrouk on France’s Europe 1 channel, Finkielkraut said: “Jean-Luc Mélenchon is betting on the Great Replacement to gain power,” adding that the Mélenchon—along with his anti-establishment La France Isourmise (LFI) party—is submissive to and allied with the political Islamism.

“France is disintegrating,” Finkielkraut lamented. “The lost territories of the Republic are territories conquered by Islamism or delinquency… Sometimes the two are interconnected. Mélenchon accompanies this ideology, anti-Semitism included.”

Tuesday’s interview segment was hardly the first time the intrepid, always-outspoken intellectual has invoked the taboo term—and the unmentionable demographic phenomenon it describes. 

In December, as France—and much of the Western world—watched the meteoric political rise of Éric Zemmour, another polemicist, essayist, and author who helped to popularize the term ‘ ‘the Great Replacement,’ Finkielkraut urged public intellectuals and media figures to abstain from vilifying advocates of the idea, asserting that “demonizing [those who use the term] as racist is absurd” and only “testifies to a fanatical denial of reality.”

I think the demographic change in Europe is extremely dramatic. The historical peoples in certain municipalities and regions are becoming a minority. Most French people now do not live in the suburbs, but beyond the suburbs, since they are often no longer culturally recognizable, because all the butchers are, for example, Halal. All of this has to be taken into account, actually, instead of simpler thinking.

Finkielkraut’s latest interview comes days after the French Left, under the leadership of Mélenchon, reached a historic agreement to form an alliance ahead of June’s legislative elections. The coalition pact, made by La France Insoumise, Parti Socialiste, Les Verts (the Greens), and Parti Communiste Français, seeks to disposses Macron of his legislative majority. 

Finkielkraut, later on in the interview segment, warned viewers of the coalition’s brand of left-wing radicalism, which according to him, along with its economically hard-left policies, embraces political Islamism and the continued transformation of France’s ethnic and cultural landscape. 

“This alliance has been celebrated by the leftist press as a resurrection of the Front Populaire, (former French President Francois) Mitterrand’s leftist union,” Finkielkraut began. “This means that the radical left is at the controls.”

“This leftist coalition is promising price freezes, the nationalization of banks, wage rises that are supposed to be followed by an increase in productivity, which are all untenable promises.”

“But there is an even more worrying aspect to this radicalism: The radicalism of La France Insoumise is a submission to radical Islamism,” Finkielkraut said, characterizing it as an “unconditional surrender.”

Finkielkraut then reminded the audience that Mélenchon had once said: “I am not afraid to say [that] what you are seeing there in these neighborhoods is the new France.”

“This means, without doubt, the new French people,” Finkielkraut said.

Having garnered nearly 70% of the Muslim vote in the first round of the presidential elections, according to a recent poll conducted by IFOP, Mélenchon’s leftist coalition is more than likely to collect an overwhelming majority of the Muslim vote this coming June.