Who is Ryad Rani, Mélenchon’s ‘protégé’ and the voice of the student protests in France?

Paris. For the past two weeks, a 19-year-old whom nobody had ever heard of outside the trade union world has become the voice of French sixth-formers’ protests against the government: Ryad Rani, who has been president of the Union syndicale lycéenne (USL) – a student union aligned with the radical left – since April. With a short beard, composed demeanour, a soft voice but the vocabulary of a professional activist, Rani is now a daily presence in front of the cameras of all-news channels and on public radio, where he denounces “social and racist selection” in schools, “decaying” facilities and “police violence”, and promises that the mobilisation will continue until the pupils’ demands are met. “We will not bow to negotiations in ministerial drawing rooms,” he declares in a rhetorical tone.

Born into a family of Algerian origin in Roubaix – one of France’s poorest cities and one with the highest proportion of Muslim residents – Rani insists on the autonomy of his association, the USL, denying that he is being “exploited” by Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise (LFI), the leader of the radical left. “There is no exploitation whatsoever. That is what the Ministry (of Education, ed.) is trying to make people believe in order to discredit our campaign,” he told France Info. Yet, in his CV, the entry ‘LFI’ appears on several occasions.

In 2022, Rani undertook an internship with LFI MP David Guiraud, the current mayor of Roubaix, who opposed the deportation of the radical Moroccan imam Hassan Iquiossen and, in June, rejected the proposal to name a school in the city after Samuel Paty, the history and geography teacher beheaded by a Chechen jihadist in 2021, describing the idea as “truly hypocritical”. Furthermore, last August, Rani took part in the Mélenchonist party’s summer university, speaking in a debate on “youth autonomy” alongside MP Louis Boyard, one of the most active figures in recent days in supporting the student protests.

Moreover, the president of the Local Health Authority (USL) stood as a candidate in the municipality of Wattrelos in the March local elections, on a united left-wing list led by the ‘Insoumis’ Thierry Duel. On Rani’s social media accounts, messages of support appear for the Lebanese activist Georges Ibrahim Abdallah, sentenced to life imprisonment for complicity in the murders of the US military attaché Charles Robert Ray and the Israeli diplomat Yacov Barsimantov, which took place in Paris in 1982, as well as for the Jeune Garde antifasciste, the far-left splinter group co-founded by LFI MP Raphaël Arnault, which was disbanded in 2025 due to repeated acts of violence.

Rani is the face of the new generation of activists from the suburbs who see Mélenchon and his inflammatory rhetoric as their representative. The LFI leader, for his part, has found in the secondary school protests a social base for his political project ahead of the 2027 presidential elections. The students’ mobilisation stems from a concrete issue – education – but is fuelled by a broader sense of marginalisation, social anger and distrust of institutions. In the secondary schools of the banlieues, where the majority of pupils are of North African and sub-Saharan African origin, this sentiment overlaps with the Palestinian cause, which has become the unifying force shaping the identity of an entire generation.

It is this explosive mix that Mélenchon is seeking to exploit for electoral gain. This is confirmed by a French intelligence report dated 29 September and entitled "The actions of secondary school pupils in Seine-Saint-Denis: a movement with an unprecedented character". The report speaks openly of the “exploitation” of the student mobilisation by LFI and its far-left proxies, accusing the LFI leader of relying on violence and social tension as an electoral strategy with a view to 2027.

Compounding the situation is the heavy-handed intervention by Iran’s mullahs who, against a backdrop of diplomatic tensions with France, are fanning the flames of the high school students’ protests. On Tuesday, Tehran summoned the French ambassador to Iran, Pierre Cochard, to protest against the “violent response” to the student demonstrations of recent weeks and the “widespread human rights violations”. This is the very same regime that, nine months ago, massacred thousands of young Iranians demonstrating across the country, after shutting down the internet to hide the carnage from the world.