He’s a left French politician, several times candidate for presidency but never won.

He is seen as Fidel Castro boot licker by boomers (he is not), extreme left by right and extreme right (he is not).

He is a great talker but also a bit of an angry man which makes him unlikable to others.

Now is party is named "La France insoumise" (LFI) and they usually have very good political agendas, like at the last presidential it was something along the lines:

• create the 6th republic based on true direct democracy
• constitution is written by the French population for the French population
• give back power to the population
• once done, quit unless asked to stay president.

But because of his image among boomers and the right propaganda against him, he never won and his party suffer from his image.

The best thing would be to have his and LFI ideas without him. They need to find another leader for their image as Mélanchon is a liability for the left to access power.

We happened to have AI pictures of him as a dominatrix today in our French server https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/12001973

Mélenchon is... frustrating.

He's the main contender on the limited field of the actual left in France. He's got a lot of proposals that are actually good and desirable.

He's also a narcissist and a populist whose stated approach to achieving his proposals is to denounce treaties he doesn't like and somehow force other countries to replace clauses with whatever it is he wants.

He's also incapable of compromises, and right now busily torpedoeing the left wing alliance that won the election because his own party didn't win enough seats to take charge of the alliance.

What I don't know is, how much of the populist/anti-system talk is just talk for political reasons, and whether he would in fact be capable of the nuance required to govern. He might. He might not. He's clearly smart and charismatic. But he's also the type to huff his own farts hard enough to mistake the visions for the truth of the world. So... In that respect, pretty much just like Macron.

France has a big, big problem with overemphasizing individual politicians over policies.

100% unprofessional take:

From what I got by quickly screening his Wikipedia article he is a ~~populist~~ French politician on the left with ~~a couple of views~~ one view so bonkers most of us on the left don’t want to have people like him on the left.

Great, we have a couple of those in Germany too. Have fun with that maniac.

Edit: Made a mistake.