Far-left Melenchon enjoys late poll surge
Anti-capitalist rhetoric during debate helped rise
PARIS — With a bleedthe-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 anti-establishment 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 vote-getters 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 anti-capitalist 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 EU 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 second-biggest economy. The difference between the 10-year bond yields of France and Germany has risen to its widest in six weeks, as investors flock to the perceived safety of German debt.
“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.