The French presidential candidate who wants to blow up the Franco-German engine

PARIS — Far-right leader Marine Le Pen isn’t the only candidate in France’s presidential election vowing to upend the status quo in the European Union.

If far-left firebrand Jean-Luc Mélenchon were to emerge as French president, he has signaled he would seek to overturn the bloc’s foundational relationship: the Franco-German partnership that has underpinned European integration for decades, but which he believes has primarily served Berlin’s interests.

There are still nine months until France’s crucial presidential vote, but Mélenchon’s strong start to his campaign and the infighting among the rest of the left has positioned him as one of the best-placed candidates to challenge Le Pen in a second round, polling shows.

That’s hardly seen as an encouraging prospect in Berlin.

M´elenchon devoted an entire book in 2015 to his disdain for the German model and — in a clean break from the traditional Paris-Berlin alliance that underpins the EU — said this month that he would not commit to a recent series of agreements between French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz on issues ranging from nuclear deterrence to industrial policy.

Right now, a Mélenchon victory isn’t seen as likely in the halls of power across the Rhine, and recent surveys show Le Pen would handily defeat him if both advanced to a runoff.

But German lawmakers acknowledge the anticapitalist’s disruptive potential.

“Mélenchon’s political positions on key issues of European policy, his hostility toward Germany … would make him a massive problem for Franco-German cooperation,” said Roland Theis, a lawmaker from Merz’s conservatives known for his work on Franco-German issues.

Berlin is much more focused on the prospect of a Le Pen victory, which would pose its own set of problems. Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, founded her political party alongside Nazi collaborators and was notorious for downplaying the Holocaust. While the younger Le Pen has tried to distance the National Rally from its past, even kicking her father out of the party, she remains a strident euroskeptic who has vowed to slash French contributions to the European Union.

Ahead of the pivotal contest, Germany and France have jointly expedited work on shared EU objectives, though they say their urgency is born out of economic necessity rather than getting work done ahead of a Le Pen presidency.

But Mélenchon poses a threat to the current German government as well.

“A Mélenchon presidency would significantly complicate bilateral and European cooperation at the highest levels,” said Anton Hofreiter, a Green lawmaker and head of the European affairs committee in the Bundestag. He warned that this could lead to European projects being built without French involvement, citing defense capabilities as an example.

‘The German poison’

Mélenchon’s antipathy toward Brussels and Berlin stems more from ideological opposition, especially to Germany, than the nationalist sentiment that fuels Le Pen’s euroskepticism.

“The Germans are imposing ordoliberalism [a German-inspired vision of free-market economics with state oversight] on Europe,” said Aurélien Taché, a lawmaker from Mélenchon’s France Unbowed party who sits on the French National Assembly’s foreign affairs committee. “We are not anti-European; we are against ordoliberalism.”

France Unbowed believes the Franco-German engine does not exist, but rather that the Germans are seeking to impose their agenda onto the EU.

Instead, Mélenchon wants France to strengthen ties with China as well as French-speaking countries in Africa, as well as South American countries. He sees the United States as an imperialist danger, while Germany — despite its turbulent relations with President Donald Trump — views the transatlantic relationship as paramount to its foreign policy. Mélenchon is opposed to Germany’s deeply held attachment to its free-market economic model and favors a planned economy instead.

Mélenchon is also critical of Germany’s rearmament and the continued presence of U.S. nuclear weapons on its soil, which he said: “raise serious security concerns for neighboring countries.” Berlin aims to become Europe’s predominant military power in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and American retrenchment from Europe.

Mélenchon’s 2015 book “Bismarck’s Herring,” subtitled “The German Poison,” was meant to be a response to the many politicians who at the time in France viewed Germany as a policy model thanks to its low unemployment and strong growth rates.

Mélenchon pointed to the poverty rate in Germany, which at that time was several points higher than in France, and low birth rates as examples of the model’s failures.

“My goal is to pierce through the veil of bliss surrounding so many commentators who are fascinated by Germany,” reads the book’s blurb. “A monster has been born right before our eyes — the child of deregulated finance and a country that has devoted itself to it, ravaged by the accelerated aging of its population.”

Parts of French media, even left-leaning outlet Libération, deemed the book excessively Germanophobic. In it, Mélenchon adopts a provocative tone and states that “political confrontation with German governments is one of the conditions for the liberation of peoples.”

Mélenchon coauthored a roughly 20-page foreign policy analysis released earlier this month that outlines some of his key international priorities, including withdrawing from NATO due to Washington’s “openly hostile” posture toward the alliance. Le Pen’s National Rally, meanwhile, has only proposed leaving NATO’s integrated command.

The document also said France should pledge to uphold the EU’s Article 42 clause, which guarantees aid and assistance from other member countries in case of an attack on one member, and even called it an “absolute priority” to extend it to territories “affiliated” with EU countries, such as Greenland.

But Mélenchon and his coauthors insisted that France should by no means be “chained to a geographic bloc,” within the EU, which is “characterized by extreme Atlanticism.”

Mélenchon is much more interested in strengthening ties with another one of France’s neighbors, Spain, whose center-left Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez he views as a better-suited ally due to his confrontational approach toward Trump and Israel.

But Berlin has been searching for new allies — especially Rome — as disagreements with Paris have piled up.

Disagreements over the EU’s landmark Mercosur trade deal with South America — backed by Germany and opposed by France — and the decision to kill a joint project to build a next-generation fighter jet have shaken Franco-German ties.

“The major decisions of the past six years — such as those regarding Mercosur or the free trade agreements with Donald Trump — have consistently favored the Germans, not the French,” said Taché, the France Unbowed lawmaker.

Yet Frédéric Petit, a centrist lawmaker in the French parliament who represents French citizens living in Germany, believes that the bond between the two countries is strong enough to survive what he called “an electoral accident.”

“The Franco-German relationship, which is backed by majorities in both countries, would absolutely not be called into question,” he said. “There are dual citizens, joint organizations and policies which, regardless of who is the next president, won’t be possible to immediately undo.”