The question of how to navigate state power was discussed largely through historical reference points. They ranged from the failure of France’s 1980s Socialist President François Mitterrand to the 1973 coup against Chile’s Salvador Allende, Gabriel Boric’s more recent experience as president in that same country, and a recurring fixation on Syriza and the Greek debt crisis of the last decade.

Stathis Kouvelakis, a former member of Syriza’s central committee and a teacher in France Insoumise’s cadre-training program at the Institut La Boétie, warned that a confrontation of some kind with the European Union would be inevitable. He reasoned that while France’s economic and political situation is better than Greece’s was, that crisis had also given Syriza cards to play that France Insoumise would probably not have at their disposal. He cited as an example Syriza’s ability to command well over majority support for a conflict with the Troika of international institutions. France Insoumise may never have this, even if it wins a presidential election.

FI lawmaker Clémence Guetté, while briefing press on the networks France Insoumise is consulting within the civil service, raised the prospect of disobeying the EU treaties if they got in the way of implementing France Insoumise’s program. Meanwhile, the party’s coordinator Manuel Bompard agreed with the banker Matthieu Pigasse that part of France’s public debt could be canceled — a position Mélenchon reiterated the day after the festival, igniting a weeklong polemic.

I got the sense that part of the goal of this year’s festival was preparing the activists, and by extension the press and the French public, for a conflict at the EU level should France Insoumise take office.

To make these more than hypothetical discussions, first had to come the strategy for taking power. In a talk to a tent overflowing with people, alongside the sociologists Manuel Cervera-Marzal and Safia Dahani, it was Bompard who laid out France Insoumise’s path to power.

To summarize: various studies have demonstrated that there is now an abstention gap in French politics between bourgeois and working-class neighborhoods. Better-off citizens go to the polls, while working-class citizens increasingly don’t. “This,” Bompard stressed, “was not always the case.” “During the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, the poor voted in greater numbers than the rich. They did so because they believed that an alternative [communism] existed to the current society, the society responsible for the situation they were in. They believed in it. They thought it was possible, so they wanted to turn toward it.”

This currently nonvoting part of the French population — in France Insoumise argot, “the fourth bloc” alongside the Left, the Macronites, and the far right — is key to Mélenchon’s strategy for beating his previous scores and reaching the runoff in 2027. Nonvoters in general are members of the social groups otherwise most likely to vote France Insoumise, such as young people. By current polling, they back France Insoumise at a rate of 48 percent in the eighteen-to-twenty-five-year-old age bracket and 33 percent in the twenty-six-to-thirty-year-old bracket. This, argued Bompard, gives the Mélenchon campaign a “massive growth opportunity,” allowing it to reach the second round.

Speaking to Jacobin, France Insoumise lawmaker Jérôme Legavre argued that this has to be done by creating a “mass campaign. . . .  that is, a campaign that’s aimed toward the mass of the population, particularly those who hate politics and political parties because they have been lied to, betrayed, scorned, and spat upon.”

France Insoumise often insists that its program, L’Avenir en commun (“The Future in Common”) is the basis of the party, rather than personality or PR alone. It is a wide-ranging document, touching on issues ranging from nationalization of steel to satellite sovereignty, child protection measures, and how humanity should share the seas.

Campaigning on this program does not mean overloading the voters with an unending policy blitz. In the first round, it means campaigning on specific issues that activate its likely electorate, like raising the minimum wage and introducing price controls on basic goods, taking a strong stance against the genocide in Palestine and pegging climate policies to weather events like heat waves that demonstrate the immediate reality of climate breakdown.

According to Legavre, the first thing the party will have to do is hold mass public meetings like Amfis, which — he concedes — “speak largely to the already convinced,” but which leave people “amped up with energy that is essential for waging the campaign.”

From there, the activists will go out across France’s territory, going door-to-door to convince people not just to vote Mélenchon but even just to sign up to the electoral register.

This is a major subject for France Insoumise, Legavre told me. After all, “millions of people in France aren’t registered to vote, and when polling day comes, they go ‘oh shit, I’m not registered,’ but, by that point, it’s too late.”

France Insoumise’s Caravanes Populaires initiative has already signed up 1,500 people to the electoral roll across the twelve days that it has been active. The party will “engage across all means of communication” including requesting help from artists and influencers to get people signed up.

Legavre, a committed Trotskyist who emphasized his view that France maintains a colonial relationship to its overseas territories, also argued that a reserve of extra voters could come from such populations outside of mainland France.

He told Jacobin about its Pacific Islander populations: “France Insoumise considers New Caledonia to be a colony, we have privileged relations with the FLNKS [Front de libération nationale kanak et socialiste, the islands’ pro-independence coalition], its activists and leaders. We have campaigned for the liberation of Christian Tein, the imprisoned president of the FLNKS. When [France Insoumise lawmakers] Mathilde Panot and Bastien Lachaud went to New Caledonia they were able to hold public meetings in areas and regions where no other politician from metropolitan France would be able to go.

“The position we have taken, the fact that we immediately demanded Tein’s liberation, that Mélenchon declared he was a supporter of New Caledonian independence and that the first thing he would do if elected is declare independence for New Caledonia, is part of what helps us. I don’t know what turnout will be like because it remains a colony, but it’s evident that we are in a position that no other party can occupy.”

As well as abstentionists and votes from France’s colonial possessions, France Insoumise hopes to avoid the splits on the Left that occurred in 2022, when the Parti Communiste Français (PCF) leader Fabien Roussel stayed in the race, getting 2 percent of the vote — more than the margin that Mélenchon needed to reach the second round. In that same election, the Écologistes’ candidate, the centrist Yannick Jadot, also maintained his hopeless presidential bid, achieving 4 percent of the vote.

While Roussel is again preparing his candidacy, today’s Écologistes leader Marine Tondelier — who is relatively more left-wing than her predecessor — is caught between two factions. One faction wants the party not to field a candidate and back the liberal Raphaël Glucksmann, whereas the other wants to back Mélenchon. Tondelier will submit the decision to run a candidate or not to a vote of Écologistes activists that will take place this autumn.

France Insoumise aims to win the argument within the Écologistes, or at least prepare the ground for a swift withdrawal of their candidate should members decide they need Tondelier in the race. Cyrille Chatelain, an Écologistes lawmaker supportive of negotiations with France Insoumise was on two panels at the festival, and Mélenchon made sure to be photographed alongside her. Verts Populaires, a splinter group of Écologistes who backed France Insoumise in this spring’s local elections against their own party line, were also given a prominent display in the lakeside “village of associations.”

France Insoumise lawmaker Guetté told journalists that there remains some room for programmatic negotiation with the Écologistes and PCF, but that they would prefer discussions to be extensive and not forged under pressure like the broad-left agreements reached for the 2022 and 2024 parliamentary elections.

The hope on France Insoumise’s part is that a generous offer for a united list for the parliamentary elections that follow the 2027 presidential contest can secure Mélenchon as the only radical-left presidential candidate, either through the other parties not running, or through early withdrawals and endorsements.

This was also part of the rationale for beginning his campaign early. As Francis Parny put it in his address to the general assembly of Insoumis Communistes (France Insoumise activists who are committed to communist ideas, many of them PCF members), every other party left of center is still focused internally, deciding who to support, or on how to run their primaries, while Mélenchon is talking to France about policy. Given this situation, and the fact that he is already polling above 15 percent, his supporters hope he can become the tactical vote on the Left with minimal fuss, and beat the centrist-neoliberal candidates to reach the second round.

Bompard stressed in his talk that in the French presidential election there are two campaigns, adapted to the conditions of each round. France Insoumise’s gamble is that if Mélenchon reaches the second round a “launch window” will open up, in the words of Jérôme Legavre. They suggest that French politics will be entirely scrambled, polarized between those who fear the far right more, and thus back Mélenchon, and those who fear the left-winger and his program.

While current polls show Mélenchon facing annihilation in the second round against Marine Le Pen (even the closest scenarios have him short of 40 percent), the abstention rates contained in those assumptions are unrealistic. Closer to such a runoff, it is likely that some of the abstainers would make up their mind in Mélenchon’s favor, narrowing the gap.

Assuming France Insoumise’s calculations are correct and they can reach the second round, there remains a question mark over whether it can rely on the antifascist republican front that has blocked the far right from power since World War II.

The framework of demonization has moved from Le Pen’s Rassemblement National to France Insoumise, today considered the main enemy of the Republic by most of the political and business elite.

Both the center and the far right are currently deploying the same attack line, claiming to be best-placed to avoid the “chaos” of a France Insoumise government.

In this connection, there is also something of a paradox in some of the analysis advanced by some supporters of Mélenchon’s candidacy. In his discussion with Bompard, sociologist Cervera-Marzal invoked the idea of “Macrono-Lepenism,” holding that there is an increasing convergence between the bloc around President Emmanuel Macron and Le Pen’s far right. If this is true — and there are plenty of examples to illustrate the concept — then relying on Macron’s rightward-moving voters to do their republican duty is surely a big roll of the dice.

When I put this to Legavre, he was unfazed. What is occurring, in his view, is not a “fascistization of the French mind” but “a fascistization of the French elite.”

Unfortunately for France Insoumise, what is required for them to make it through the first round is visibility, radicalism, and noise, but in the runoff they’ll need to be at least minimally reassuring to centrist voters, if these latter are to prefer Mélenchon to Le Pen.

In the second round France Insoumise intends to address its campaign to the mass of the people, campaigning on issues where the Left enjoys majority support among the populace, and where the Right does not, such as repealing Macron’s pension reform, a version of which Le Pen now supports.

Whether this will be enough to convince citizens to vote positively for Mélenchon, or at least to vote negatively against Le Pen, remains to be seen.

In the evenings, when alcohol was permitted, the mood at the Amfis festival switched from one of dogged preparation and intellectual debate, to one of celebration and frivolity, with the political discussion switched out for DJ sets. Amfis is primarily an event for and by activists rather than for the mass public, and the crowds left with a renewed feeling of political possibility. Several activists speaking to me said that although they understood the scale of the challenge ahead, the festival had left them feeling like they could do it.

I got the sense that whatever happens over the coming eight months, France Insoumise and their hundreds of thousands of activists are prepared to give it their all. They’ll be campaigning like their lives depend on it.