Five days after officially announcing his fourth presidential candidacy at the Elysee, Jean-Luc Mélenchon specified on May 8, 2026 on LCI what his foreign policy would be towards major authoritarian powers. His positions on Taiwan, the Uighurs, and Iran expose France to strategic risks that his own leftist allies now refuse to endorse.
On May 8, 2026, from Marseille, Jean-Luc Mélenchon answered questions from LCI for an hour and a half. What would France do if China invaded Taiwan? “If China takes Taiwan and I am President of the Republic, we will not interfere,” he said. He added, “Taiwan is part of China.” He admits in the same sentence that China is “a dictatorship.” This does not change his response.
The declaration has a genealogy. A few days before his official announcement of candidacy on May 3 on TF1, Mélenchon had posted on Meta that he intended to “honor the word and signature of France and General De Gaulle” on the principle of the One China policy, referring to the diplomatic recognition of the People’s Republic by Paris in 1964. France does not recognize Taipei: it is a real diplomatic fact shared by many states, but announcing preemptively that no military annexation of the island would justify a French reaction clearly goes beyond legal continuity.
Dominique Moïsi, a geopolitical advisor at the Montaigne Institute, directly pointed out the consequence: declaring in advance France’s passivity “amounts to giving Beijing a blank check.” The 24 million Taiwanese live under a democratic regime threatened by a nuclear power. This is not a geopolitical abstraction.
Marine Tondelier, president of the Ecologists, responded on social media: “If China annexes Taiwan, we must intervene politely and respectfully so that it happens calmly.” A few weeks earlier, she had published a note titled “Move Away from Fascination for China,” where she denounced the vision of Beijing as the “pillar of stability” in Mélenchon’s thinking. LFI responded immediately. Bastien Lachaud accused Tondelier of a “war-mongering” posture, and Danièle Obono criticized the “uneasiness” provoked by her attacks.
Raphaël Glucksmann had formulated a similar critique more sharply in February 2024 regarding Ukraine. The reluctance of LFI to arm Kyiv inspired him to say, “France Insoumise contributes to the defeat of democracies.” Senator Rachid Temal spoke of “Radio Moscow.” These two formulations originally targeted Ukraine but now apply to a second front.
In January 2022, the National Assembly passed a resolution recognizing the violence against the Uighurs in China as “constitutive of crimes against humanity and genocide.” The text garnered 169 votes in favor, one against, and five abstentions. The four LFI members present abstained.
Before this vote, Mélenchon publicly expressed his position: “I do not believe in the genocide thesis. Those who use it, in my opinion, do not serve us because they trivialize a word whose full impact they do not seem to grasp.” He described the situation as “repression carried out by the Chinese government against Uighur Islamist organizations.” On Thinkerview, he called those who spoke of genocide “lap dogs” of the Americans.
Amnesty International established in 2021 that Beijing’s treatment of the Turkic-speaking Muslims of Xinjiang amounted to crimes against humanity. Human Rights Watch estimated around 500,000 Uighurs were still detained after the repressive wave started in 2017. In August 2022, the UN Human Rights High Commissioner concluded that these violations “could constitute crimes under international law, particularly crimes against humanity.” Mélenchon’s refusal to use the term “genocide” is not a cautious legal nuance; it is a factual reading directly contrary to the findings of three independent institutions.
Anasse Kazib, a Trotskyist activist, called Mélenchon’s position on the Uighur genocide “scandalous.” He writes that the insubmissive leader “echoes Chinese propaganda that reduces what happens in Xinjiang to repression against Uighur Islamist organizations” and “de facto disassociates from the Uighur people.” This criticism 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 stated that France “sometimes has more common interests with China than with its European partners,” criticized “the EU’s alignment with the American strategy of confrontation,” and argued that accusations of Chinese expansionism “lacked evidence.”
The League of Human Rights criticized the report for “silencing the massive and systematic human rights violations committed by the Chinese government, especially in Tibet, Xinjiang, and Hong Kong.” Defense experts criticized its “naivety” regarding Chinese economic espionage threats and academic interference. Le Monde judged it “embarrassing” for France’s European partners. This report is not just a statement; it is an official document produced by the candidate’s parliamentary group.
On March 1, 2026, following the American-Israeli bombings that killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Mélenchon made a two-part statement. First, he called Khamenei “the executioner of the Iranian people,” whose record “is written with the blood of his countless victims.” Second, he condemned the attack as “a denial of all international law,” attributable to “Trump and Netanyahu’s supremacist will.”
On May 8 on LCI, he went further: if he had been president during the February 28 attack, he would have formed a “front of refusal” uniting Spain, Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico against the intervention. The legal argument is valid: an aggression without a UN Security Council mandate violates the UN Charter. But the magazine Regards noted that Mélenchon put “the aggressor and the aggressed on an equal footing” and left Macron and the UN to handle a crisis for which he did not organize any significant mobilization. Calling a leader “executioner” and then building an international coalition to defend his regime from the consequences of his actions highlights a tension between the two postures that has not been explained.
Mélenchon summarizes his vision in a formula: “neither Moscow, nor Washington, nor Beijing, but Paris.” He presents it as a Gaullist continuity: exiting NATO, refusing a defense Europe aligned with Washington, multilateralism based on international law. His criticisms against Macron have a substance: sending the Charles-de-Gaulle aircraft carrier to the Strait of Hormuz, following “the law of the jungle,” and abandoning the French diplomatic independence tradition. These arguments exist in serious strategic debates.
Thomas Gomart, IFRI director, identified a “transatlantic schism” before the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee that requires France to adapt, not retract. Bruno Tertrais, deputy director of the Foundation for Strategic Research, believed that the illusion of an “interdependence that would necessarily bring peace” is now “invalidated by facts.” Treating Russia, China, and Iran as reliable partners in a stable multipolar order stems, according to him, from a “profound naivety.”
The Telos review, founded by university political scientists, was more direct about Ukraine: Mélenchon’s position, supporting the thesis that Zelensky “is no longer president” as his mandate has expired, is “a pure copy of Vladimir Putin’s position.” Mikael Hertoff, a Nordic political scientist quoted in the Bastille Network, observed that “the vast majority of the left” in Scandinavian countries supports Ukraine. LFI is an exception in the European left landscape on this issue.
Marianne summarized the underlying mechanics as “fierce hostility towards American imperialism, at the expense of minimizing those of China and Russia.” International law is invoked to condemn Washington and Tel Aviv but applied with notable discretion when the facts concern Xinjiang or Taipei. This double standard is not accidental; it results from a hierarchy of priorities in which anti-Americanism takes precedence over ethical coherence. For a candidate vying for the roles of Commander-in-Chief and Chief Diplomat of France, this hierarchy comes with a cost that his allies are starting to recognize.
