Jean-Luc Mélenchon and the required second of clarification | EUROtoday

Six days after the loss of life of far-right activist Quentin Deranque, crushed on a sidewalk in Lyon, the arrests have relaunched the required debate on the ambiguities of La France insoumise (LFI). Between Tuesday February 17 and Wednesday February 18, the judicial police arrested 11 individuals. Several of the suspects are the topic of an “S” file for political radicalization, resulting from their membership within the Young Guard, an anti-fascist group from Lyon, dissolved in June 2025 for its strategies thought of violent.

Among these arrested are three family members of the LFI deputy for Vaucluse Raphaël Arnault, additionally founding father of the Young Guard: two of his parliamentary collaborators and one of many former interns of his parliamentary crew. The hyperlinks between sure suspects and Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s motion have now been confirmed. This proximity and the seriousness of the info require greater than denials and biased responses from “rebellious” officers.

Appearing in 2018, the Young Guard has been near LFI for the reason that starting of the 2020s. Again on February 11, the day earlier than the occasions in Lyon, a press launch from LFI judged “attacks fundamental freedoms” the process for dissolving the Young Guard. In April 2025, Mr. Mélenchon described his members because the “young comrades” of a “allied organization, linked to the “rebellious” motion”. A couple of months earlier, in 2024, LFI had Mr. Arnault elected to the National Assembly. His closing conviction, in December 2025, after his withdrawal on enchantment, for “intentional violence in meetings”, had not provoked any response from LFI.

Since the arrests, Mr. Mélenchon and his family members haven’t renounced both the Young Guard or MP Arnault, who merely introduced that he needed to terminate the contract of one in all his implicated collaborators. Faithful to a pacesetter who’s impervious to criticism, drawn into infinite battle, the Mélenchonists kind a unit, counterattack and attempt to create a diversion. The first reflex of the “rebellious” leaders was to level out that they’re frequently focused by the acute proper, or to take refuge in a sufferer posture by declaring the “responsibility of public authority”which might not have sufficiently protected the streets of Lyon, in response to the phrases utilized by Mr. Mélenchon on Tuesday night.

Throughout France, this affair should not obscure the violence of a number of small id or neofascist teams. The majority of acts of political brutality come from these teams, a actuality utterly swept away by the appropriate and the acute proper, allied, for a number of days, to use the loss of life of Quentin Deranque so as to demonize a part of the left. But this political restoration mustn’t exonerate LFI. In mild of the info, Jean-Luc Mélenchon and people near him, who’ve by no means publicly advocated bodily violence, can now not summarize the motion of the Young Guard as “self-defense”.

Thursday February 12, on the sidelines of a convention by MEP Rima Hassan, two teams fought throughout a brawl. Then people beat to loss of life a younger man, remoted, on the bottom. The “rebels” neither brought on nor instantly provoked this insupportable lynching, however their political duty is actual. They should make clear the state of affairs by breaking with the violent parts of their motion and excluding sure allied teams.