MEP Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the presidential candidate for the far-left political party La France Insoumise (LFI), has vowed to withdraw France from the NATO military alliance if he is elected President in the 2027 French presidential election.
Talking to the local news channel LCI, he claimed that he wants his country to leave NATO because it ‘serves only one thing: placing us under the supervision of the United States’. Mélenchon has been a long-time critic of the military alliance.
In his recent statements, Mélenchon also referenced France’s 1966 withdrawal from NATO’s integrated military command under President Charles de Gaulle, while criticizing former President Nicolas Sarkozy’s 2009 decision to reintegrate the country into NATO’s command structure.
The NATO alliance is currently seeing a historic level of internal tension. US President Donald Trump has threatened to withdraw the US as well, for lack of support from other member states in his mission to secure the Strait of Hormuz during the US’s conflict with Iran.
Another NATO critic in a major member state, Mélenchon’s political party got around 10 per cent of the popular vote in the 2024 European Parliamentary election in France, earning them six seats in the continental legislative body. In the snap legislative elections called in the same month, however, they were included in the broader left-wing Nouveau Front populaire (NFP) coalition, which secured the most seats in the National Assembly, despite getting more than 10 points fewer in the popular vote than the right-wing populist Rassemblement national (RN).
Thus, it is hard to discern exactly how much support LFI has nationally, or how popular Mélenchon’s stance on NATO is. However, the military alliance being attacked from both sides of the political spectrum in two major member states certainly signifies a noteworthy, tense moment in NATO’s history.
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