At the invitation of Nabil Benabdellah’s PPS, the leader of LFI begins a visit to Morocco on October 4 which will take him to Marrakech, Rabat, Casablanca, and finally Tangier, his hometown. On the program: meetings with politicians and a conference around the release of his latest book.
Ten years after his last visit, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the Insoumis, begins a tour of Morocco on October 4. A tour with highly symbolic content for someone who spent his first eleven years in Tangier. The idea for this trip was born almost a year ago from the desire to strengthen cooperation between Moroccan and French left-wing movements. A subject all the more burning as diplomatic relations between the two countries remain at a standstill.
If Mélenchon’s arrival in Morocco was discussed almost a year ago, the earthquake that struck the country last September accelerated the timetable. A political figure from LFI, halfway between the kingdom and France, made it possible: MP Farida Amrani. She will be part, with Gabriel Amard, deputy for Essonne, also of Moroccan origin, of the delegation that will accompany Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
Visit to Amizmiz
For the first stage, in Marrakech, this October 4, Jean-Luc Mélenchon will go to the medina of the ocher city to express his solidarity with the victims of the earthquake that devastated the Al Haouz region on September 8, causing nearly 3,000 deaths. He will then go to Amizmiz, a village in the High Atlas, where he will discuss with the local political representative the progress of the relief operations. But this trip to Morocco will also be a promotional tour for the French politician, during which he will present his latest book, Do Better! Towards the citizen revolution. A political essay addressing ecological planning.
This theme will also be at the heart of the conference he will give in the large amphitheater of the law faculty of Hassan-II University in Casablanca, on October 5. The next day, in Rabat, a second public meeting will be held at Mohammed V University.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon should then meet with the mayor of Marrakech, Fatima-Zahra Mansouri, as well as with several members of the government coalition from the Party of Progress and Socialism (PPS), Nabil Bendabdellah, but also the ‘Istiqlal, headed by the Minister of Equipment and Water, Nizar Baraka. A dinner in honor of the LFI leader is also planned for October 6 with the France-Morocco parliamentary friendship group at the home of its president, Mohamed Zidouh.
This journey will conclude on October 7 with a detour to Tangier, a city that the three-time presidential candidate remembers with fondness as an “unbelievable world”. In 2022, one month before the presidential election, questioned about his childhood in Tangier during the INA’s “DNA” program, he described “a sort of mixture of peoples, clothes, and languages, which was extraordinary “.
Recalling memories on the benches of the Perrier School, or the Berchet School in Tangier, or picnics at Capes Spartel and Malabata, he recounted a life “permanently in a sort of active internationalism”, and remembered “an attachment, a good nature of the link to the Muslim world”.
Painful exile
Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s parents, Jeannine and George, pieds-noirs from Algeria who had lived in Morocco for two generations, were of modest origins. The first, a teacher in a school in a slum in the suburbs of Tangier, was a practicing Catholic. “Missionary”, as her son describes her, she would have “given him the foundations of an enlightened socialism”, making him and his sister Marie-France aware of “the suffering of men and animals, very mistreated in the ‘era,’ he confided to the press in 2012.
Little Jean-Luc, himself serving as an altar boy, was then fascinated by the smells and songs associated with religious rituals. “At that time in Morocco, in our environment, French identity was therefore confused with the Catholic religion,” he explains in The Choice of Insubmission in the Face of Marc Endeweld. Meanwhile, the father, an atheist postmaster, remained “outside during the service”.
A few years later, when his parents divorced, the family was excommunicated. A “totally unfair” exclusion for Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who returned to France with his mother in 1962. Direction Marseille first – the city for which he was elected deputy in 2017 –, then Normandy. A second life but above all a “tearing away from smells, from landscapes, from a hustle and bustle”. Years later, we learn from the work Mélenchon le plebeien which is dedicated to him, he still kept in his office, at the headquarters of the Left Party, “a colorful poster representing the port of Tangier”.
