For his political return, Jean-Luc Mélenchon (LFI) calls for a general strike on September 10

"September 10 must be a day of general blockade , that is to say, as far as employees are concerned, September 10 must be a general strike," declared the leader of the Insoumis in front of several thousand activists in Chateauneuf-sur-Isère, near Valence in the Drôme.

"It's not up to me to decide, of course," he recalled.

"We need a general strike on September 10 because on September 23, we will submit a motion of censure to bring down Mr. Bayrou's government," he insisted, while the Insoumis hope to bring down the Prime Minister in the National Assembly, ultimately forcing President Emmanuel Macron to resign.

"Nobody knows how it all started, but thousands of people rallied around it from the start," said the three-time presidential candidate.

"What everyone knows is that from the outset, citizens' assemblies were created and that more will be created," he added about September 10, a movement whose contours have so far been poorly defined and which notably demands more tax justice and a rejection of the Bayrou plan for France's 2026 budget.

But Jean-Luc Mélenchon was keen to dismiss any accusations of political "recuperation", as his troops were the quickest to call for support for these calls for blockades and strikes.

"Our strategy is to help and serve the movement," he promised.

The former Socialist senator, who is scheduled to speak to several media outlets on Saturday, did not directly respond in his speech to calls for unity on the left in view of the 2027 presidential election.

What about the union?

The day before, at the Ecologists' summer university, the party's leader , Marine Tondelier, once again made a plea for the union of all left-wing forces, her hobbyhorse.

"Let's stop the personal attacks and the picrocholine wars, and the 'commedia dell'arte', and the 'blah blah blah, if you put a dissident in there, I'll put one in there for you (...) We don't have time," she insisted.

On the left, Olivier Faure's Socialist Party, the Ecologists and the former Insoumis ( Clémentine Autain, François Ruffin ) are fervent defenders of unity in the face of the threat of the extreme right.

But the two presidential candidates, Raphaël Glucksmann and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, refuse to do so, highlighting the programmatic differences on the left. The latter has already said he is in favor of unity, but behind LFI and around his program of rupture.

Present in Strasbourg on Thursday, the rebellious deputy Alfa Dufour reported "strategic divergences" between her party and the other formations which, last year, formed the New Popular Front (NFP).

Each party has its own return

The LFI summer universities will also feature a debate on Saturday on the "Betharram" commission of inquiry into violence in schools, to which the rebellious MP Paul Vannier has invited the Macronist MP Violette Spillebout.

Both were co-rapporteurs of this commission of inquiry.

The radical left movement's big back-to-school gathering will close on Sunday morning with a meeting of the head of the LFI deputies, Mathilde Panot , and the movement's coordinator, Manuel Bompard .

La France Insoumise has refused access to its summer universities to the journalist from Le Monde, Olivier Pérou , co-author of the investigative book on LFI "La Meute".

During his speech, Jean-Luc Mélenchon first greeted the journalists present on site.

"We are not upset when they speak ill of us (?) often we feel that it helps us more than it harms us," he said.

"You will soon be replaced by artificial intelligence, because you don't have more than 200 words to think about reality," he added.

For its part, the French Communist Party is organizing its summer universities in Montpellier this weekend, with a speech by Fabien Roussel expected on Saturday.

Next week, it will be the socialists and the "unitarians" (ex-LFI) who will return.