What is leftwing about this guy? He just sounds like a bloviating nationalism stoking empty populist candidate.

Making common cause with “the enemy of my enemy” – whatever the consequences for the less powerful – as a shortsighted form of “realist” foreign policy is certainly nothing new. (Neither, in Mélénchon’s case, does it end at Europe’s borders: “Taiwan is China,” he told French TV in May). But how is any of this principled, or leftist?

After a summer when France burned and burned and burned, how is the frontrunner for the left a man who is calling for reopening the poison-drip of natural gas from a state that has been, for years, in an undeclared war hybrid war on France along with the rest of Europe? It seems Mélenchon, who has wanted to withdraw France from Nato for decades, has not updated his worldview since 1985 when he first held public office. But this is not the anti-American position it once was: it is simply to attack from the inside what Putin seeks to dismantle from the outside.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/oct/01/jean-luc-melenchon-young-french-voters-russia-foreign-policy