The 17th October mobilization was always going to be unprecedented: as early as September, domestic intelligence agencies were combing through reports of planned attempts to storm the Élysée, France’s presidential palace, and last week, the main police union feared a “black day.”
But the movement in itself is anomalous insofar as its mobilizing grievances are hard to deny: the French education system is chronically underfunded; teacher shortages are the norm; many schools suffer from deficient infrastructure; making 15-year-olds sit in a classroom from 8 am until 6 pm is abysmal. Bar the latter, which some, like former Prime Minister and presidential hopeful Edouard Philippe, may defend in the name of elitism, it is difficult to envisage an argument in favor of unsanitary schools. It is therefore equally anomalous, yet contextually unsurprising, that the political responses to these grievances specifically have not diverged significantly, but remedies differ.
Last summer, long before this period of unprecedented turmoil, Le Point, France’s veteran right-leaning paper, ran a front-page headline that read: “Why our kids are voting for Mélenchon, and what to do about it.” Mélenchon, the immovable radical left leader, indeed polls significantly higher than other candidates among young voters. In theory, there is nothing unusual about this trend: the left, especially its radical, revolutionary wing, has historically been the natural political home of the young. But what is uncanny about this specific case is how methodically LFI has become the face of the current movement.
There is a twisted irony in this infatuation: LFI is feeding the youth promises designed to galvanize it, without offering any actual vision. One example is instructive: Parcoursup. The platform is France’s university admissions infrastructure, created in 2018 to retire a previous system widely criticized for its opacity. Parcoursup was marketed as a transparent, individualized remedy.
It has not delivered, and the platform has been dogged by accusations of opacity, with universities free to filter applicants however they wish without being required to disclose the admissions criteria.
As a result, Parcoursup has been a centerpiece of the ongoing protests and a leading grievance among young protesters, to the point that improvement proposals when it comes to this issue are part of the five policy workstreams assigned by Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu to his cabinet.
LFI and Mélenchon were soon boastful about their longstanding opposition to Parcoursup when the protests broke out, and conversely, many protesters lauded LFI for its commitment.
In France, of the major parties, two call for its wholesale abolition. The first is Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN). The second one is Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s LFI. That the far-right and the far-left agree on remedies should already be a red flag.
In truth, Mélenchon’s stance makes perfect sense when one looks at his and his party’s ideological history. His modus operandi throughout his recent career has been premised on a simple equation: oppose everything, dismantle everything, from the Fifth Republic to Parcoursup to NATO.
But anyone who is truly interested in bettering the condition of French students should immediately have a question: what’s the alternative? After all, it is entirely legitimate and indeed healthy to oppose certain policies and systems and call for them to be abolished, but one cannot replace something with nothing — and yet, that is exactly what LFI hopes to do.
Pressed on this question, LFI’s answer amounts to replacing something with nothing: in lieu of a centralized platform, LFI wants to restore automatic admission on the sole basis of the baccalauréat. Mélenchon himself is the idea’s loudest champion; this is a 75-year-old man who went to university in the early 1970s, trying to impose the admissions system of his own youth on a student body roughly four times the size it was back then.
To defend its proposal, LFI invokes a case it hopes to build its model on: Belgium. There, too, the irony is simply otherworldly: since September 2026, parallel to the French protests, the French-speaking region of the country has been rocked by one of its most sustained waves of student unrest in years. And even Belgium’s system isn’t actually open: precisely because French students would otherwise flood into programs like medicine and dentistry, both bottlenecked back home, Belgium had to cap non-resident enrollment at 30% in those fields. The model LFI points to, in other words, only works because it stopped being an open-admission system; it exists precisely because unlimited access collapses the moment demand gets this high.
Automatic admission was only ever workable when the number of baccalauréat holders seeking a course roughly matched the seats available, but France’s higher education system has expanded dramatically since the years of Mélenchon’s studies, while the number of amphitheaters, professors and university housing is still finite. Parcoursup and its predecessor were not created for the sake of adding unnecessary bureaucracy but because the very system LFI hopes to resuscitate stopped functioning once demand began to outstrip supply. The party’s “solution” is cosmetic and would have the opposite effect of what its proponents claim it would, because it would not address the finitude that made selection necessary in the first place; the result would be administrative chaos. This, too, is characteristic of LFI: tabula rasa, and instead, chaos that it is responsible for but will blame on some other institution.
Parcoursup is but one instructive case worth zeroing in on, but it is a symptom of a broader issue: populism. LFI has mastered the art of co-opting social movements to instrumentalize them, but when it comes to a vision for governance, the bonanza dries up. In order to reinvest massively in education, the state will need a sustained public-works budget, year after year; as banal as that may sound, public spending is not free, and it hinges on the existence of a state that is fiscally responsible enough to spend reliably over time, without spooking the markets it borrows from or triggering the kind of austerity correction that tends to hit these very budgets first. Institut Montaigne, one of France’s leading independent think tanks, costed LFI’s 2022 program (whose fiscal logic is nearly identical to the one on offer for 2027) at roughly €332 billion a year in additional spending (about 13% of GDP).
LFI’s economic program would likely worsen the issues at hand. The numbers are as unambiguous as they are vertiginous: France has run a budget deficit for 52 consecutive years, and has exceeded the EU’s 3%-of-GDP ceiling continuously since the pandemic. This situation is so grave that the country has been under a formal EU “excessive deficit procedure” since mid-2024. Public debt is also climbing year after year, still nearly double the treaty limit.
Financial markets have already reacted poorly to these ideas, long before LFI acceded to government: when the left-wing coalition, including and arguably led by LFI, formed ahead of the 2024 elections, they promised to repeal the controversial 2023 pension reform and raise taxes on the wealthy. Subsequently, the risk premium on French government bonds jumped to its highest level in over four years while the gap between French and German borrowing costs widened to levels not seen since the eurozone debt crisis.
It is impossible to fund a frugal reinvestment in public services without growth, and it is impossible to have growth if the capital that finances public spending flees the country. LFI’s program has to be paid for, and the party says it will do so through steep taxation; that, too, will invite a recession. Patrick Martin, who presides over MEDEF, the largest employer federation and business lobby in France, has warned that a 2027 LFI government would send French business leaders heading for the exits. This thinly veiled threat can be criticized, but it cannot be wished away and reflects a reality: capital is mobile, and talent and firms do, in fact, relocate when a jurisdiction signals it intends to extract more from them than its neighbors. Therein lies the central contradiction sitting underneath LFI’s program, and it is precisely that contradiction that makes its program dangerous economically and, therefore, socially, because the first segment of the population that will be impacted by a crumbling economy will not be the well-off families, but the middle and working class the party claims to advocate for. There, too, the party is selling false promises to an electorate that seems increasingly seduced by its language.
