“The month of January in a campaign is like starting all over again. » Jean-Luc Mélenchon is in Nantes, Saturday January 15, in rehearsal for his meeting “immersive”. “New fact in the campaign, there is none, apart from that and Mrs. Taubira”, he said, while the former minister of justice has just declared his candidacy. On the meeting side, this “world premiere”, so vaunted by his team for weeks, complicates the life of the candidate of La France insoumise (LFI) in the presidential election. No digression possible when he takes oratorical detours so easily, you have to follow the pace of the staging, shorten the flowing speech, refine the sequences, a bit like an actor.
Sunday is coming. This is his big launch, a “relaunch meeting” after the holiday break, underlines its campaign manager Manuel Bompard. Since his distant declaration of candidacy in November 2020, Jean-Luc Mélenchon wants to be ” time master ” and try to keep the advantage of starting first. “By choosing the day when I started, we became the master of the others”, he explained on Saturday. This immersive meeting is a tool in this strategy. A gimmick? Perhaps, but its formal success fuels comparisons against the very modest formats deployed by its competitors on the left and beyond.
In a room of 3,000 people, 3,500 by squeezing a little, each of the walls of which is entirely lined with video projections, a neat scenography is set in motion. It starts in a classic way, with the announcement of a few political rallies. The communist deputy for Seine-Maritime Sébastien Jumel announces it on video: “You have to be in a close row behind the candidate who is best placed to qualify for the second round. » The Génération s mayor of Trappes (Yvelines), Ali Rabeh, does the same in person, calls for “cut to pieces the discourse that demands union for union’s sake”. Then the opera begins, there is even a « libretto ». The “rebellious” deputy Clémentine Autain reads the words of the novelist Annie Ernaux, the anthem of the Women’s Liberation Movement resounds, with words of “yellow vests”, demonstrations and selected pieces of the texts of Jean Jaurès and the writer Edouard Glissant.
A sea breeze potpourri
Jean-Luc Mélenchon arrives, faded to black, stars light up. To talk about space and denuclearization, it is in the moonlight. Or clear of Earth, it depends on the side where one is seated in the virtual cube which surrounds it. “The blue planet with this thin film that surrounds it, the nest of humanity that above all must be protected. Look at it, there is only one ecosystem that supports the life of human beings, he says. “There is the Station [spatiale] international, there it is a satellite, there it is the Moon. » Jean-Luc Mélenchon guides his audience in a one-on-one with the planet. Megalo but effective in anchoring the candidate in ecology.
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