Mélenchon’s mission for his young fans: Debate boomers on Facebook

PARIS — Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s campaign has a plan for winning over older French voters: get his young supporters to sign up for Facebook to talk to their parents. Mélenchon, 75, may be the oldest candidate in next spring’s race to replace Emmanuel Macron. But his progressive platform and call for a civic revolution have made him a hit with younger voters, who are more likely to scroll through TikTok and Snapchat than through the old-school social network. “We’re strong [on every other social media platform],” said Antoine Léaument, who handles the Mélenchon campaign’s communication operations. “Facebook is one of the places where the digital battle could be decisive.” More than 40% of voters younger than 35 plan to vote for Mélenchon, according to a recent Cluster17 poll commissioned by POLITICO. That figure drops to 14% or less across the age brackets over 50 — groups that, if they use social media at all, tend to favor Facebook over its newer rivals. According to Médiamétrie, France’s leading audience measurement company, platforms like Instagram and Snapchat have 35% more daily users than Facebook among 15-to-24-year-olds. On TikTok, which skews younger, Mélenchon has about twice the following of any other presidential candidate. “Their digital campaign is paying off very quickly,” said a strategist from a competing campaign, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly. The strategist also underlined that the share of comments on social media posts describing Mélenchon in a positive light was rapidly rising despite how he’s been vilified by his opponents. But on Facebook, Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally reigns. Since June, National Rally posts have drawn more than 2 million reactions, more than those of any other French political party, according to data from social monitoring platform Visibrain shared with POLITICO. The page of the National Rally’s local branch in the small region of Vienne alone generated more reactions than the pages of Macron’s Renaissance party. “Engagement on Facebook is very concentrated,” around the National Rally, Visibrain said. Listen to the kids Recent polls show that Mélenchon’s core base of young voters puts him in a strong position to secure a second-place finish in the first round of the presidential election. That would earn him a spot in a runoff against Le Pen, who has held a double-digit lead for first place in surveys for months. (French presidential elections advance to a two-candidate second round if no one wins 50% of the vote on the first try.) Beating Le Pen, however, will require winning over larger swaths of the electorate. Though pollsters and political scientists urge caution about polling a runoff so early in a campaign, the second-round surveys pitting Le Pen against Mélenchon show the far-left candidate on track for a crushing defeat. Marine Le Pen speaks at a rally in Orléans, France on Oct. 25, 2026. | Bastien Ohier/Hans Lucas/AFP via Getty Images Many older voters remain undecided about what they would do when faced with that match-up, so the answer could lie in whether they decide to listen to their children. Léaument has been rallying activists from Mélenchon’s France Unbowed to share content en masse on the platform via an open WhatsApp channel, which currently counts over 170,000 members, posting calls to action or campaign clips to share on their social media accounts. “WE MUST RE-ENGAGE WITH FACEBOOK AT ALL COSTS! WE MUST NOT LEAVE ANY GROUND TO THE FAR RIGHT,” he urged activists in a message posted to the channel. That playbook is partly borrowed from André Janones, the Brazilian lawmaker who used the messaging app to mobilize supporters of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva ahead of his surprise reelection last month. It has at least one obvious limitation: Political parties have no control over social media algorithms. In Brazil, Lula’s campaign alleged that Meta, which owns Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, was boosting Bolsonaro and suppressing its con