Plucking the LFISTE chicken
To try to win over Socialist voters, the Communists had, in the last century, devised a strategy of joining forces with them in the hope of “plucking the Socialist chicken”! in other words, to use the alliance to their own advantage.
A few decades later, the scenario was reversed: François Mitterrand used the Union of the Left to progressively marginalize the Communist Party.
This time, the “chicken” had changed sides.
Could history repeat itself, in another form?
LFI (1) has made winning over part of the Muslim electorate a central element of its strategy.
In the 2024 European elections, according to Ifop, 62% of Muslim voters who cast a ballot voted for the LFI list. This was a politically significant result.
But it now raises a simple question: “Who depends on whom?”
If LFI becomes dependent on this electoral mobilization capacity, those who provide its votes may, in return, acquire significant influence over it.
This is precisely the phenomenon that a parliamentary commission of inquiry sought to document.
Its report, published in December 2025 and devoted to the “existing links between representatives of political movements and organizations and networks supporting terrorist activity or disseminating Islamist ideology” [2], examines, among other things, the strategies used by Islamist movements to influence elected officials and political parties.
The report notes that these movements know how to “approach, influence, make themselves useful, and even indispensable to those seeking to occupy a particular segment of the electorate.”
It also identifies a “real risk of infiltration” and devotes a chapter to the “questions raised by the publicized proximity of certain elected members of La France Insoumise to individuals promoting Islamist ideology.”
The commission obviously does not condemn a political party for seeking to win over an electorate. But it observes that this strategy may have led certain LFI elected officials to display “signs of complacency, or even active support” toward individuals close to Islamist networks.
It also documents “convergences and publicized forms of proximity” between certain elected officials and individuals promoting Islamist ideology.
The commission considers that, while there are not, “a priori,” any “demonstrable structured links at this stage between political parties and Islamist movements,” there are indeed “connections and publicized forms of proximity between certain elected officials, primarily from La France Insoumise, and individuals promoting this ideology.”
According to the Commission, the issue is not to claim that there is an organized system linking political parties to Islamist movements. Rather, it is to acknowledge the existence of sufficiently documented relationships, conduct, and influence strategies for the question of infiltration to be legitimately raised.
By definition, infiltration does not begin with a seizure of power.
It begins with intermediaries, contacts, support, dependencies, and successive concessions.
That is precisely why we need to recognize the phenomenon before it is too late.
The issue is obviously not to challenge the right of Muslim citizens to vote massively for LFI. That right is the same as that of every citizen.
The question is a different one: how can we prevent organizations pursuing an Islamist agenda from turning their capacity to mobilize voters into a capacity to influence institutions, elected officials, or the rules we share?
In other words: Is LFI winning over an electorate — or is that electorate winning over LFI?
[1] “La France Insoumise,” the party led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon
[2] Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry Report No. 2235, National Assembly, registered on December 10, 2025 and published in December 2025.
