Allez les Bleus, Allez la Gauche: Mélenchon’s France shirt is a masterstroke

La France Insoumise is selling France 2027 campaign shirts disguised as World Cup kits, proving that the left can do populism just as well as the right, if it's bold enough to try.

The left-wing French political party La France Insoumise (LFI) has embarked on an ingenious marketing ploy that combines football and politics – a Mélenchon 27 football jersey, sold to fund Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s presidential bid. The shirts have proved an instant hit, with the first 1,000 sold out within two hours of going on sale.

The blue, white and red shirt mimics the official French national team kit but replaces the emblematic rooster and French Football Federation (FFF) insignia with “LFI.” According to left MP Antoine Léaument, who oversees the Mélenchon campaign’s communications, the aim is to make the shirt “accessible and worn as widely as possible”. “It’s a nice way to support both the French national team and the LFI at the same time,” Léaument said.

LFI says that the shirts, costing €25 each, are a gesture of sporting patriotism and direct campaign financing. Ironically, Mélenchon himself has a long-professed indifference to football, once declaring in 2014 that he knew nothing about football and was not interested in it.

The football shirt is part of a wider communications strategy, which is seeing LFI embrace contemporary left populism by using the visual imagery of national identity to ‘sell’ a socialist message. This tactic was also similarly employed by socialist mayor of New York Zohran Mamdani very successfully during his mayoral campaign last year.

Interestingly, LFI isn’t the first to try this. Nigel Farage’s Reform UK got there first, launching its own branded football shirts in the summer of 2025 – complete with his name and the number 10 on the back. Unsurprisingly, this has led to accusations from the French right that LFI is simply copying Farage’s playbook, with Charles-Henri Gallois, an adviser to National Rally’s Jordan Bardella, dismissing the Mélenchon shirt as a straight lift from the Reform leader. If so, it's a rare case of the populist right doing something the left should have thought of first – and better late than never that LFI has caught up.

It’s good to see the left following suit with these tactics rather than leaving the visual politics of national identity solely to the right. As the French presidential elections get closer, expect to see many of the Mélenchon 27 football jerseys on display across France and even further afield.

Lefties in the UK can show their support for La France Insoumise by ordering the shirts below.

Click here to order the Mélenchon 27 football shirt.