“Ladies and gentlemen, comrades, I give you your candidate for the 2027 presidential election, Jean-Luc Mélenchon!” This past Sunday, tens of thousands of people filled the streets of Saint-Denis in Paris’s northern suburbs. Despite the sun beating down, they’d come to watch left-winger Mélenchon launch his campaign. It was a powerful demonstration of the electoral war machine that Mélenchon has been building ever since his first run in 2012.