La France Insoumise (, ; LFI or FI) is a left-wing to far-left political party in France. It was launched in 2016 by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, then a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) and former co-president of the Left Party (PG). It aims to implement the eco-socialist and democratic socialist program ().
The party nominated Mélenchon in the 2017 French presidential election. He came fourth in the first round, receiving 19.6% of the vote and failing to qualify for the second round by around 2%. After the 2017 French legislative election, it formed a parliamentary group of 17 members of the National Assembly, with Mélenchon as the group's president. In the 2019 European Parliament election in France, it won six seats, below its expectations.
In 2022, Mélenchon again became the party's candidate for president, and later, Christiane Taubira, winner of the 2022 French People's Primary, endorsed Mélenchon. In the first round of 2022 French presidential election voting in April, Mélenchon came third, garnering 7.7 million votes (21.95%), narrowly behind second-place finisher Marine Le Pen.
History
La France Insoumise was founded on 10 February 2016, based on the belief that traditional parties and political organisations no longer serve democracy. The movement is inspired by the Spanish party Podemos, the election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour Party leader in the United Kingdom in 2015 and the candidacy of Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic Party presidential primaries in the United States. Its first meeting took place in Place de la Bataille-de-Stalingrad, Paris, on 5 June 2016 in the form of a march numbering about 10,000 people, according to the organisers. A second meeting took place in the gardens of the Toulouse Observatory on 28 August 2016.
The programme () was adopted during the Lille convention, attended by just under 1,000 people in Saint-André-lez-Lille on 15/16 October 2016. Several people addressed the convention, including former Société Générale trader Jérôme Kerviel, LuxLeaks whistleblower Antoine Deltour, political specialist Paul Ariès, former Malian Minister of Culture Aminata Traoré, and former Speaker of the Hellenic Parliament Zoe Konstantopoulou.
At this convention, the movement also presented twenty candidates for the 2017 French legislative election, including Jean-Marie Brom, physicist, research director of the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and spokesperson of Sortir du nucléaire; Rémy Garnier, public finance inspector and whistleblower in the Cahuzac affair; Lionel Burriello, leader of the CGT union for the ArcelorMittal steel works in Florange; Mehdi Kémoune, deputy secretary-general of the CGT union for Air France; actress Sophie De La Rochefoucauld; Marie-Hélène Bourlard, trade unionist featured in the movie Merci patron!; Olivia Cattan, journalist and founder of the association SOS Autisme France; and Nathalie Seguin, trade unionist and member of the French Communist Party (PCF).
In August 2017, La France Insoumise organized its first summer university (called Les AmFIs, a play on the word amphitheater and the acronym FI for France insoumise), a tradition in France where campuses open their doors to political party gatherings and meetings between activists, elected officials, philosophers, and cultural commentators. It was set in the Marseille Saint-Charles University and comprised four days of debates, conferences and workshops. The movement also debated its future."La France Insoumise s'installe à Marseille" (in French), lci.fr.
In the 2017 Corsican territorial election, local supporters of La France Insoumise under the banner of La Corse Insoumise allied with the PCF. The PCF-FI alliance attacked Jean-Luc Mélenchon, and Mélenchon disavowed the list. During the 2024 French legislative election, La France Insoumise refused the nomination of five "rebels": Frédéric Mathieu, Danielle Simonnet, Raquel Garrido, Alexis Corbière, and Hendrik Davi...
2017 presidential campaign
The 2017 presidential campaign was directed by Manuel Bompard, national secretary of the PG, its spokesperson was Alexis Corbière, former councillor of Paris and also national secretary of the PG and its coordinators were Charlotte Girard, lecturer in public law at the Paris Nanterre University and Jacques Généreux, lecturer in economy at the Paris Institute of Political Studies.
On 15 November 2016, Mélenchon held a meeting at Le Manège conference centre in Chambéry. Another similar meeting was held on 29 November at the in Bordeaux. This meeting was attended by 1,100 people, with several hundred more people outside unable to fit into the theatre. Another large meeting took place on 18 March 2017 in Place de la Bastille in Paris.
La France Insoumise was polling at 11.5% a month before the first vote. Mélenchon received 19.58% in the ballot, finishing fourth and not reaching the final round by a few hundred thousand votes; despite this, Mélenchon was the most voted candidate of the French left, eclipsing the Socialist Party candidate Benoît Hamon.
2022 presidential campaign
In November 2020, Mélenchon announced his intention to run for the 2022 presidential election. He conditioned his candidacy to a petition put online by his La France Insoumise party. After winning the threshold of 150,000 signatures, he formally became the party's candidate for the election. In the first round of voting, Mélenchon garnered 7.7 million votes, coming in third among twelve candidates with 22% of the vote, behind president Emmanuel Macron in first place with 28%, and narrowly behind Marine Le Pen with 23% of the vote.
2024 legislative elections
The far-right National Rally achieved unexpected success in the 2024 EU parliamentary election, sparking significant fear of a hard-right parliamentary majority. In June, these fears would result in the formation of the New Popular Front, a left-wing electoral alliance that included La France Insoumise as a founding member. La France Insoumise rallied in the polls after this, with the New Popular Front supporting more extensive co-operation between left-wing parties. The party achieved success in this election, winning 71 seats. The New Popular Front won 192 seats, constituting a plurality, with La France Insoumise contributing the largest proportion of its seats.
Ideology Ideologically, La France Insoumise is variously described as holding democratic socialist, anti-neoliberal, eco-socialist, souverainist, left-wing populist, and soft Eurosceptic positions. On the political spectrum, the party is described as left-wing, as well as far-left. Far-left is also a label often used by its critics, including the incumbent centrist French president Emmanuel Macron and former socialist French President François Hollande.
According to political scientist Rémi Lefebvre, the programme of La France Insoumise is part of a socialism that is "very interventionist, very reformist, that believes in the essential role of public services, in ecological planning, in redistribution", and what it questions is "more ultraliberalism than capitalism itself". According to Aurélien Dubuisson, an associate researcher at the Sciences Po Historical Centre and author of The Far Left in France published by the Blaise Pascal University Press, defining La France Insoumise as far-left is "a mistake that has been made in recent years, especially by the right wing of the political spectrum". Dubuisson cites François Mitterrand's programme from 1981, which he said would be considered "the worst extremist of the moment. But in 1981, the political context was different, it was permeated by left-wing themes." According to both Dubuisson and Lefebvre, the programme of La France Insoumise is no more radical than Mitterand's.
Candidates of the party for the June 2017 legislative elections were 60% from civil society (have never been members or elected representatives of a political party), with an average age of around 43 years. The invested candidates have signed the charter of the movement as well as the ethical charter of the independent association Anticor, committed to ethics in politics, the fight against corruption and tax noncompliance. Beginning in late 2018, Mélenchon and the leadership of La France Insoumise made a significant shift by abandoning their sovereigntist and ultra-secularist stances. This decision led to the expulsion of key members such as Georges Kuzmanovic, marking a clear change in the party's ideological direction.
Islamophobia has been a controversial question on the French Left; La France Insoumise puts opposing Islamophobia high among its priorities. The party receives high numbers of votes from Muslim communities. Jean-Luc Mélenchon reportedly altered his policies to attract Muslim votes. For example, he began speaking out against Islamophobia in France, notably by participating in the "March Against Islamophobia" in 2019 and organized protests after the Bayonne mosque shooting. He became, as El Pais called him, one of the "great enemies" of satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo as well as "laïcité" (secularism in France). Mélenchon advocated that French become a "common language" and be renamed, becoming a Creole language. He argued that French had spread to other countries as a result of colonialism and was "no longer the exclusive property of the French nation".
The 2022 programme for the Popular Union includes a number of proposals, such as replacing capitalism. In August 2025, during the congress of France Insoumise, in Châteauneuf-sur-Isère, near Valence in the Drôme, the party called for a strike for 10 September 2025, to oppose the 2026 budget bill, presented by François Bayrou.
LFI supported Palestine and the BDS movement, was the first party to accuse Israel of committing genocide and criticized the French government's support for Israel. The party called for sanctions and an arms embargo on Israel and is the only left-wing party in the country who refused to recognize Palestinian militant group Hamas as a terrorist organization, preferring to designate them as "Palestinian forces" responsible for "war crimes". Mathilde Panot said the party wishes to recognize Palestine as a country. As the Gaza war took place, the conflict was one of the main topics the party discussed during the 2024 European Parliament election.
Political programme The drawing up of the programme was coordinated by economist Jacques Généreux and lawyer Charlotte Girard. It drew its inspiration from (), the programme of the Left Front during the 2012 French presidential election, from work carried out by the PG during its conventions on eco-socialism and summits for a "plan B in Europe", and from contributions from supporters of the movement, which the rapporteurs were asked to synthesize. At the end of the Lille Convention, a synthesis of all the proposals resulted in a programme of seven axioms and 357 measures. It was adopted by more than 90% of voters. The movement proposes "ten emblematic measures", approved during the Lille Convention, calling for four main "emergencies" to be addressed: the democratic emergency, the social emergency, the ecological emergency, and the geo-political emergency. Adopted by 77,038 votes in an Internet poll, these ten measures are: