Leftist’s surge in polls worries financial markets

PARIS — With a bleed-the-rich video game and suggestions of a “Frexit,” French far-left candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon is rattling financial markets by rising in polls just 11 days before the country’s presidential vote.

Melenchon’s surge is the latest surprise in a roller-coaster campaign that’s being closely watched around Europe and has featured a strong dose of antiestablishment populism.

Most polling agencies still show that centrist Emmanuel Macron and far-right candidate Marine Le Pen are leading ahead of the April 23 first round presidential vote, with the top two votegetters advancing to the May 7 presidential runoff. Yet Melenchon, once a distant fifth, has risen in recent polls to roughly third, about even with conservative presidential candidate Francois Fillon.

Melenchon’s sharptongued wit and eloquent anticapitalist rhetoric during the two presidential debates helped boost his standing among an electorate frustrated with France’s traditional left and right parties, which have failed to create jobs or pull the country out of its economic stagnation.

Promising to heavily tax the rich and renegotiate France’s role in the European Union and trade pacts, Melenchon is also giving financial markets a new reason to worry. A possible French departure from the EU — a “Frexit” — would be devastating to the bloc.

Investors are growing more cautious ahead of the presidential election in the eurozone’s secondbiggest economy.

“With the growing threat of Euroskeptic parties destabilizing the eurozone’s unity weighing heavily on sentiment, the euro may be in store for further punishment,” Lukman Otunuga of FXTM said Wednesday.

Melenchon, 65, is an unlikely iconoclast. He spent decades in mainstream politics, serving in a Socialist government and in parliament. He now leads a far-left alliance that includes the Communist Party.

Yet Melenchon tapped into the populist zeitgeist — and the social media revolution — years ago.

An early Twitter user, he has mastered tweets targeting the world of finance. His YouTube channel — started for the 2012 presidential campaign, where he finished fourth — has garnered 21 million views. He’s using holograms to broadcast election rallies to multiple cities at once.

And his campaign has generated new attention in recent days thanks to a goofy online game called Fiscal Kombat created by his supporters. The player — represented by a rudimentary caricature of Melenchon — grabs leading politicians and shakes them until money falls from their pockets. The money, presumably stolen from the masses, can then be used to build a more egalitarian economy.