It was a first meeting that felt more like a reunion. For the first of his four-day visit to Dakar, on Wednesday, May 15, Jean-Luc Mélenchon met with Ousmane Sonko, the Senegalese prime minister. The founder of La France Insoumise (LFI) was the first senior French politician to be received by the new government, six weeks after Bassirou Diomaye Faye's victory in the Senegalese presidential election.
This favor no doubt stemmed from the support he has given in recent years to the leaders of the African Patriots of Senegal for Work, Ethics and Fraternity (PASTEF), when the party was in opposition to the previous president, Macky Sall. According to Dakar, no meeting with the new president was "on the agenda for the moment," but it would not have been incongruous.
Just before he began his stay in prison in April 2023, Faye had spoken alongside Sonko with Mélenchon and those close to him by videoconference for an hour. "It was warm and constructive. We talked about monetary issues, unequal trade with Africa and the oligarchy that exploits people on both sides," said Arnaud Le Gall, LFI MP, recalling the discussion last year. Even though the government is welcoming the left-wing opposition figure to Dakar, "there's no bad feeling towards the French authorities," said Senegal's Communications Minister Alioune Sall. "We make a distinction between our privileged relations with friendly parties and our age-old relations with France."
Anti-imperialist rhetoric
In Africa, Mélenchon was also cultivating his differences with the French government. While the government has watched with concern the growing tension in Senegal in recent years, taking care not to take sides, LFI has shown its support for the opposition. "Of all the French political parties we contacted to denounce the ongoing repression, LFI was the only one to respond," said Sall. PASTEF had found a vocal advocate in the French political arena. In January 2023, MPs Aurélien Taché (NUPES, the left-wing alliance that includes LFI) and Le Gall openly sided with Sonko and those close to him in a speech to the Assemblée Nationale.
As he has now been doing in Senegal, Mélenchon has long been plowing the African terrain with his anti-imperialist rhetoric, in search of allies and popularity. In 2021, he visited Burkina Faso, then led by Roch Marc Christian Kaboré, where he paid tribute to the figurehead of pan-Africanism, the popular revolutionary Thomas Sankara.
At the end of October, while visiting the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kinshasa, the Frenchman paid his respects at the memorial to Patrice Lumumba, the Congolese independence hero assassinated in 1961. He then met President Félix Tshisekedi and proceeded to denounce the international community's inertia in the face of the March 23 Movement's new offensive in the east of the DRC, backed by neighboring Rwanda. "You can't have principles that apply to Ukraine against Russia and not have the same ones about the DRC against its Rwandan invader," Mélenchon had said at a meeting with Congolese MPs.
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