Le Bourget (France) (AFP) – In the game of the most crowded rooms in this presidential campaign, it is for the moment the Insoumis who are winning. And Jean-Luc Mélenchon and his troops intend to continue their momentum on Saturday with a new big meeting at Le Bourget, to present their program.

Published on: 07/11/2026 - 00:32

After Clermont-Ferrand last month and before Le Havre next month, La France insoumise is returning this weekend to the Paris region, where it is most established, with this meeting at the Bourget exhibition center, in Seine-Saint-Denis.

On Friday, 17,000 activists were registered for this event. With up to 20,000 people expected to accentuate the good dynamic of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, given by the latest polls able to qualify for the second round.

The Insoumis, who are leading the race on the left, were able to count during the week on the support of the majority of the communist and overseas group in the National Assembly, including its president Stéphane Peu, elected from Seine-Saint-Denis.

And the Mélenchonist group hopes to soon benefit from the support of the small Génération.s party, founded by Benoît Hamon, and its six deputies.

Saturday, with this meeting, "we have three objectives: demonstrating the strength and dynamics of our campaign, highlighting our team and presenting our program", explains LFI coordinator and campaign director, Manuel Bompard, to AFP.

Because this event follows the release in bookstores on Friday of the presidential program of the Insoumis, the new version of “The Future in Common”, with 1,069 proposals.

And the radical left movement, always keen on technological innovations, intends to show in an original way what their applied program would look like.

Le Bourget, symbolic place

“We will broadcast a short film, between fiction and reality, with passages between stage and screen, to show how + The Future in Common + will change people’s lives,” Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s entourage told AFP.

On the left, the choice of the Bourget exhibition center as a meeting place is not insignificant.

This is where the socialist candidate François Hollande held his now famous meeting in January 2012, during which he said: "My real adversary (...) is the world of finance."

It is also there - and this reference surely speaks more to Jean-Luc Mélenchon who despises François Hollande - that François Mitterrand held his last first round meeting during his campaign for re-election in 1988.

The former socialist president still remains a tutelary figure for the Insoumis candidate who was a member of the PS for more than 30 years.

Widely beaten in the second round by Marine Le Pen in all the polls, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a very divisive figure, is challenged to show himself as a unifier, as Mitterrand did, in order to hope to win.

The scenography of his last meeting near Clermont-Ferrand, on October 11, was already a nod to that of Mitterrand's first meeting in Rennes in 1988.

And Jean-Luc Mélenchon's new campaign poster, unveiled on Friday, is reminiscent of that of François Mitterrand in 1981, "The Quiet Force".

Like the socialist of his time, Jean-Luc Mélenchon poses in front of a rural background, the site of Gergovie in Auvergne which he particularly likes, while his movement is known to be mainly established in large cities and their suburbs.

The poster is covered with the slogan “Liberty, equality, solidarity”.

“Fraternity is an individual behavior, solidarity is a political project,” explained Manuel Bompard.

© 2026 AFP

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