The Comedian in the Empty Field: Coluche, Grillo, and what the left keeps forgetting

Postscript: what the Ukrainian left got right about Zelensky

TL;DR. When the organised left vacates the ground, a comedian tends to fill it, and part of the left convinces itself the joke is a weapon. It has happened before. In 1981 the comedian Coluche polled into double figures for the French presidency; the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire refused to endorse him, ran its own candidate and attacked his 'all rotten' populism for dissolving class politics into cynicism, while still defending his democratic right to stand against a rigged system. His candidacy evaporated; the organisation he later built, the Restos du Cœur, endured, which is the whole lesson: the durable thing is the organisation, not the spectacle. Italy shows the darker ending. Beppe Grillo's Five Star Movement filled the vacuum left by Rifondazione's 2008 collapse, sold horizontal democracy while Grillo personally owned the party, and in 2018 governed with Salvini's hard right. Two comedians, two vacuums: in neither case was the comedian the answer, and in both he was the symptom of a left that was no longer there. Why this keeps happening, and why naming it is not the same as fixing it, is the harder question the piece ends on.

It happens every time the ground goes soft under the organised left. A comedian steps forward, the polls twitch, the establishment panics, and a section of the left convinces itself that this time the joke is a weapon. Back the funny man against the frightening one. It feels like audacity. It is usually surrender, and the reason it is surrender is a lesson our own tradition learned twice, once in France and once in Italy, and mostly declined to remember in between.

Start with the case where the Fourth International actually did the work.

On 30 October 1980 the comedian Michel Colucci, Coluche, declared himself a candidate for the French presidency. He ran as the candidate of ‘those who don’t count’, the marginalised, the ones politics forgets, under a slogan that told you everything about its limits and its appeal at once: ‘un pour tous, tous pourris’, one for all, all rotten. It was received as a joke, a canular. Then it stopped being funny. By the turn of the year the polls had him in double figures, around eleven per cent in the IFOP survey of the new year, reported in some accounts as high as sixteen, and a comedian polling sixteen per cent in a presidential race is no longer a comedian. He was a threat, and the threat was to a particular vacancy in French politics.

Because the ground under the French left had already gone soft. The Union of the Left had collapsed in 1977, the Socialists and Communists were at each other’s throats, unemployment was climbing, and a whole layer of working-class and young voters had been left without anyone who spoke for them. Into that gap walked a man in dungarees who said the whole political class was rotten and got a roar of recognition for it. The response of the state was not laughter. Coluche was dropped from his radio slots, faced audit threats, received a death threat from a far-right police group; the period around his campaign was ugly, and it darkened further with the death of his stage manager, which the authorities eventually established as a domestic killing rather than a political one, though the handling of it kept the pressure on the campaign. He withdrew on 16 March 1981, in the first issue of Charlie Matin, and later called on his supporters to vote for Mitterrand. The joke was over. The question it had posed to the left was not.

Here is what the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire did with that question, and it is more interesting than either of the easy options.

The LCR did not endorse Coluche. It ran its own candidate, Alain Krivine, who had carried its banner in 1969 and 1974 and who was promptly locked out of the 1981 ballot by his failure to gather the five hundred signatures of officials, a rule built precisely to strangle anti-system candidacies. And the Ligue criticised Coluche, sharply, on exactly the ground that matters. ‘Tous pourris’ collapsed the distinction the whole of Marxist politics rests on: the difference between the bourgeois politician and the workers’ organisation, between the class enemy and the imperfect instruments of your own side. A blanket contempt for ‘politicians’ is not a class politics. It is a mood, and a mood that curdles easily into the cynicism that says nothing can be built and no one is worth trusting, which is the cynicism the right has always harvested better than we do.

And yet the Ligue did not join the establishment’s dismissal of him either. When the state came after Coluche with audits and sackings and the signature rule, the LCR defended his right to stand, as a democratic question, against a system rigging its own contest. One of its own, the filmmaker Romain Goupil, a militant of May 1968 and at one point of the Ligue, actually ran the campaign, put its machinery together, pulled in the far-left and Hara-Kiri networks around it. ‘Je suis à la disposition de Coluche pour mettre en place sa campagne,’ Goupil recalled: I am at Coluche’s disposal to set up his campaign. So the tradition’s stance was not the flat refusal of the purist, and not the eager embrace of the enthusiast. It was a third thing, and it is the thing worth learning: refuse the vote, name the empty anti-politics for what it is, defend the democratic right, and keep building the only instrument that lasts.

I want to be honest here, because the recognition test cuts toward the dead as much as the living, and Coluche will not survive a lazy caricature. He was not a hollow celebrity. He had, in the words of those who knew him, an instinct de classe; he spoke for the Montrouge poverty he came from and never pretended he hadn’t; he did his homework on food surpluses and arms-factory conversion; he wanted television that explained the economy to people instead of past them. A left that files him under ‘novelty candidate’ and moves on has not understood him and will not learn from him. The point is not that Coluche was contemptible. The point is that even a candidacy with real feeling and real class instinct behind it could not substitute for the organisation that wasn’t there.

Which is exactly what the aftermath proved, and it is the part of the story that should be pinned above every debate about backing a comedian.

The candidacy evaporated in the spring of 1981. What endured was something Coluche built four years later, with no ballot involved: the Restos du Cœur, the food-solidarity movement founded in 1985 that is still feeding people four decades on. The durable thing was not the campaign. It was the organisation. And even that, the Fourth International would not simply applaud. Writing after his death, Rouge gave the Restos their due and named their limit in the same breath: ‘Coluche cache la misère’, Coluche hides the poverty, generosity mobilised as spectacle while the question of jobs goes unasked, charity as an ‘immense opération de dévoiement idéologique’, a vast ideological diversion that stays at the level of distribution and never reaches the root. You can hear, in that verdict, the same argument the Ligue made about the candidacy, now made about the charity: material solidarity is not nothing, but it is not the same as class power, and confusing the two is how a moment of real generosity gets absorbed back into the order it meant to indict. The judgement is hard. It is also, I think, correct, and it is the reason the Restos and not the campaign is the thing history kept: the organisation outlived the spectacle, and even the organisation was measured against the higher standard of what would actually shift the balance of forces.

That was 1981, and the left had the capacity to argue about it in real time, to run its own candidate, to staff the comedian’s campaign and critique it at once. Watch what happens when the ground goes soft again and the left no longer has that capacity.

The Italian left did not collapse gently. In 2008 Rifondazione Comunista, the great hope of the Italian radical left, was wiped out of parliament entirely, and a void opened where a workers’ party used to be. In October 2009 a comedian and a web strategist launched a movement to fill it. Beppe Grillo had built his following the way Coluche had, on forensic comic assaults on corruption and the political caste; the Movimento 5 Stelle he founded with Gianroberto Casaleggio declared itself neither left nor right, rejected the old axis as meaningless, and promised a horizontal democracy run through the internet. It walked straight into the space Rifondazione had vacated and took the votes of the people the left had stopped reaching.

But look at what the horizontal rhetoric actually concealed. Grillo personally owned the movement’s name, its symbol and its blog; the 2013 statute was signed by Grillo, his nephew, and an accountant, and when the movement wanted to detach the founder’s personal web address from its own logo in 2015 it had to hold a members’ vote to do it, on Grillo’s own say-so that the movement was now ‘mature enough’ to govern. He sat above it as its ‘guarante’, its guarantor, a personal authority presiding over a party that advertised itself as leaderless direct democracy. The contradiction was not incidental. It was the model. And it curdled in a way Coluche’s candidacy never had the chance to. In June 2018 the anti-establishment movement that was neither left nor right took Italy into government, and its partner was Matteo Salvini’s League. M5S supplied the parliamentary majority; Salvini, the junior partner by seats, supplied the direction, and the direction was the closed ports, the refused rescue boats, the proposed census of Roma, the decree that stripped protection from migrants. The spectacle that became a party ended as the majority for the hard right. There is a grim postscript that tells you what the thing had been all along: in 2024, when the movement finally voted to abolish the office of guarantor, Grillo went to court to stop it, the founder suing his own creation to keep his ownership of it, and the current leader accused him of trying to sabotage the party that had outgrown him.

Two comedians, then, and two vacuums, and two endings that look opposite and say the same thing. Coluche’s candidacy failed and the organisation he later built endured, because the durable thing is always the organisation. Grillo’s candidacy succeeded, became a party, and the party curdled into the far right’s vehicle, because a movement with no class content and no accountable structure has nothing to stop it drifting wherever the institutional pressure pushes. In neither case was the comedian the answer. In both cases the comedian was the symptom, the thing that grows in the space where the workers’ movement used to be.

So when a section of the left looks at a satirical candidate and sees a weapon, the question to put is not whether the joke is good. Coluche’s jokes were good; Grillo’s were better. The question is what is being built underneath, and the honest answer, most of the time, is nothing, and the trouble with nothing is that it does not stay empty. The right is patient about vacuums. It waits, and it fills them, on the same terrain of forgotten towns and abandoned classes where the comedian briefly stood, and it does not withdraw in March and endorse the Socialist. It governs.

I would like to end this with the instruction that follows, and I find I can’t, quite. The Fourth International’s answer to Coluche was the right one and it is available to us still: refuse the vote, name the anti-politics, defend the democratic right, build the instrument. But the LCR could give that answer in 1981 because it had a candidate to run and a campaign to staff and a paper that reached the estates. The harder truth beneath both these stories is that the comedian keeps arriving because the left keeps failing to be there first, and no amount of correct analysis of spectacle and organisation conjures organisation into being. That is the problem this essay can name and cannot solve. The field keeps emptying. Someone keeps walking into it in a costume. And the work of making sure it is one of us, next time, standing on something real, is not done by writing about comedians. It is the thing we keep failing to do in the years between the jokes.

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Postscript: the comedian who won

There is a third case, and it is the one that should stop anyone reaching for a neat conclusion.

In 2019 a comedian won. Volodymyr Zelensky had played a schoolteacher who accidentally becomes president of Ukraine on television, and then he became president of Ukraine, taking the run-off against Petro Poroshenko in a landslide. He ran on the fuel that powered Coluche and Grillo: the political class is rotten, the professionals have failed you, I am not one of them. He was the anti-politician made flesh, elected overwhelmingly in a country whose organised left had been ground down first by Stalinism and then by three decades of oligarchic capitalism.

What followed refuses every moral we might want to draw. Zelensky did not curdle into Grillo’s ending; he did not evaporate into Coluche’s. In February 2022 he stayed in Kyiv, and the comedian became the figure around whom resistance to an imperialist invasion was organised, which is not a sentence anyone writing about satirical candidates in 2019 would have predicted. Nor has his presidency delivered anything a socialist would recognise as a programme. In 2022 he ratified Law 5371, which stripped collective protections from workers at small and medium enterprises and suspended union rights under martial law: the anti-oligarch campaigner signing away the rights of the workers who were dying at the front.

And here is the thing worth carrying out of this essay. Sotsialnyi Rukh, the Social Movement, a small Ukrainian socialist organisation and since 2024 a permanent observer of the Fourth International, was able to do two things at once. It fought for Ukraine’s defence against Russian imperialism, alongside comrades of the Russian Socialist Movement, with whom it issued a joint position in April 2022 together with Belarusian socialists. And it fought its own president’s attack on Ukrainian workers, saying plainly that the government had tried to abuse the situation of war to attack labour rights and that they could not support it. Defence of the country, opposition to the government, in the same breath, without contradiction.

It could do that because it had something of its own. A name, an organisation, a press, roots in the unions. Ask what an organisation that had dissolved itself into the landslide would have had to say when Law 5371 arrived. Nothing, or nothing that anyone would have listened to, because it would have spent its independence on the comedian and had none left when the bill came.

That is what independence is for. Not purity, and not the satisfaction of standing aside: the capacity to still be able to fight the man you may one day have to defend. Coluche, Grillo, Zelensky. The question was never what the comedian would do. It was what stood beside him, and whether it had kept its own name.

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