Five days after officially announcing his fourth candidacy for the Élysée, Jean-Luc Mélenchon clarified on LCI, on May 8, 2026, what his foreign policy would be in the face of authoritarian great powers. His positions on Taiwan, the Uyghurs, and Iran expose France to strategic risks that his own left-wing allies now refuse to endorse.
On May 8, 2026, from Marseille, Jean-Luc Mélenchon answered questions from LCI for an hour and a half. If China invades Taiwan, what will France do? “If China takes Taiwan and I am president of the Republic, we will not stand idly by,” he said. He also admitted that China is “a dictatorship.” This does not change his response.
This declaration has a genealogy. A few days before his official announcement of his candidacy on May 3 on TF1, Mélenchon had stated on Meta that he intended to “honour France and General De Gaulle’s word and signature” on the principle of the One China policy, referring to Paris’ diplomatic recognition of the People’s Republic in 1964. France does not recognize Taipei as a fact of diplomacy shared by many states. But announcing preemptively that no military annexation of the island would justify a French response goes far beyond legal continuity.
Dominique Moïsi, a geopolitical advisor at the Montaigne Institute, pointed out the direct consequence: declaring France’s passivity in advance “gives Beijing a blank cheque.” The 24 million Taiwanese live under a democratic regime threatened by a nuclear power. This is not just a geopolitical abstraction.
Marine Tondelier, president of the ecologists, responded on social media: “If China annexes Taiwan, we must intervene politely and respectfully to ensure calm. Xi Jinping must tremble!” Previously, she had published a note entitled “Moving away from the fascination for China” denouncing Mélenchon’s vision of Beijing as “a pole of stability” in his thinking. LFI responded immediately. Bastien Lachaud accused Tondelier of a “warmongering posture,” while Danièle Obono criticized the “discomfort” caused by her attacks.
Raphaël Glucksmann had expressed a similar criticism in harsher terms, in February 2024, regarding Ukraine. The reluctance of LFI to arm Kyiv inspired him to say that the France Insoumise was “working for the defeat of democracies.” Rachid Temal, a PS senator and Vice-Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the Senate, referred to “Radio-Moscow.” These formulations were originally about Ukraine but now apply to a new scenario.
In January 2022, the National Assembly voted on a resolution recognizing the violence against the Uyghurs in China as “constitutive of crimes against humanity and genocide.” The text received 169 votes in favor, one against, and five abstentions. The four LFI elected officials present abstained.
Before this vote, Mélenchon publicly stated, “I don’t believe in the genocide thesis. Those who use it, in my opinion, are not helping us, because they trivialize a word whose full impact they don’t seem to grasp.” He described the situation as “repression by the Chinese government against Uyghur Islamist organizations.” He referred to those who spoke of genocide as “poodles” of the Americans.
Amnesty International established in 2021 that Beijing’s treatment of the Turkic-speaking Muslims in Xinjiang amounted to crimes against humanity. Human Rights Watch estimated that about 500,000 Uyghurs were still detained after the repressive wave launched in 2017. In August 2022, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights concluded that these violations “could amount to international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity.” Mélenchon’s refusal to use the term “genocide” is not a cautious legal nuance but a direct contradiction with the findings of three independent institutions.
Anasse Kazib, a Trotskyist activist from Révolution Permanente, wrote a piece titled “Mélenchon and the Uyghur genocide: a scandalous position.” He stated that the rebellious leader “echoes Chinese propaganda that reduces the situation in Xinjiang to repression against Uyghur organizations” and “effectively dissociates himself from the Uyghur people.” The critique does not come from the right.
In June 2025, the European Affairs Committee of the National Assembly published a 153-page report signed by LFI deputy Sophia Chikirou on EU-China relations. The document claimed that France “sometimes has more common interests with China than with its European partners,” criticized “the EU’s alignment on the American strategy of confrontation,” and argued that accusations of Chinese expansionism “lacked evidence.”
The League of Human Rights denounced a text that “silences the massive and systematic human rights violations committed by the Chinese government, notably in Tibet, Xinjiang, and Hong Kong.” Defense experts criticized its “naiveté” in the face of Chinese economic espionage threats and academic interference. Le Monde deemed it “embarrassing” for France’s European partners. This report is not just rhetoric: it is an official document produced by the candidate’s parliamentary group.
On March 1, 2026, following American-Israeli bombings that killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Mélenchon issued a two-part statement. He first called Khamenei “the executioner of the Iranian people” whose “record is written in the blood of his countless victims.” Then, he stated that the attack was “a denial of all international law,” attributable to “the supremacist will of Trump and Netanyahu.”
On LCI on May 8, he went further: if he had been president during the February 28 attack, he would have built “a refusal front” uniting Spain under Pedro Sanchez, Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico against the intervention. The legal argument has a real foundation: an aggression without a Security Council mandate violates the UN Charter. But the magazine Regards noted that Mélenchon treated “the aggressor and the aggressee equally” and deferred the crisis management to Macron and the UN without organizing any significant mobilization. Calling a leader “an executioner” and then seeking an international coalition to defend his regime from the consequences of his actions creates tension between the two stances that has not been explained.
Mélenchon summarizes his vision with the phrase: “neither Moscow, nor Washington, nor Beijing, but Paris.” He presents it as a Gaullist continuity: exiting NATO, rejecting a defense Europe aligned with Washington, and multilateralism based on international law. His grievances against Macron have substance: sending the Charles-de-Gaulle aircraft carrier to the Strait of Hormuz, following “the law of the strongest,” and abandoning the French diplomatic independence tradition. These arguments exist in serious strategic debates.
Thomas Gomart, director of IFRI, identified a “transatlantic schism” before the Senate’s Foreign Affairs Committee that requires France to adapt, not retreat. Bruno Tertrais, Deputy Director of the Foundation for Strategic Research, believed that the illusion of an “interdependence that would necessarily lead to peace” is “now invalidated by the facts.” Treating Russia, China, and Iran as reliable partners in a stable multipolar order proceeds from a “profound naivety.”
Marianne summarized the underlying mechanics: “a fierce hostility to American imperialism, even at the cost of downplaying those of China and Russia.” International law, invoked to condemn Washington and Tel Aviv, is applied discreetly when the facts concern Xinjiang or Taipei. This double standard is not an accidental contradiction but a result of a hierarchy of priorities in which anti-Americanism trumps ethical coherence. For a candidate vying for the roles of chief of the armed forces and France’s top diplomat, this hierarchy comes at a cost that his allies are starting to acknowledge.
