Reactions to the invasion are quite hostile throughout the spectrum of parties represented in France’s National Assembly. The only exception is President Emmanuel Macron (see separate slug); however, his Foreign Affairs Minister Jean-Noël Barrot condemned the attack in the mid-afternoon. The military operation in question “contravenes the principle of non-use of force, which underpins international law,” said Barrot, adding, “France reiterates that no lasting political solution can be imposed from the outside and that sovereign peoples alone decide their future.” Repeated violations of this kind, added Barrot, are likely to have “serious consequences for global security, sparing no one,.” France “reiterates its commitment to the Charter of the United Nations, which must continue to guide the international actions of states, always and everywhere.”
The leftwing parties—LFI, Socialist Party, PCF and the Greens—were the first to react and the most vehement, denouncing the “collapse of international law.” “World peace is at stake,” said Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of La France Insoumise (LFI), in a post on X. “Trump’s U.S.A. is seizing Venezuela’s oil, violating its sovereignty with an archaic military intervention and the heinous kidnapping of President Maduro and his wife. Drug trafficking is now the pretext used by the empire and its political and media agents to destroy what remains of the international order free from the law of the fittest,” Mélenchon asserted. LFI has organized a Paris rally this afternoon at Place de la République. “With Ukraine, Gaza, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, invasion has once again become a modus operandi.”
Marine Le Pen, president of the National Rally, also denounced the invasion: “There were a thousand reasons to condemn Nicolás Maduro’s regime: communist, oligarchic, and authoritarian. It had, for far too long, imposed a pall of oppression on its people, plunging millions of Venezuelans into poverty—when it didn’t force them into exile. But there is one fundamental reason to oppose the regime change that the United States has just brought about in Venezuela.
“The sovereignty of states is never negotiable, regardless of their size, power, or continent. It is inviolable and sacred. To renounce this principle today for Venezuela, for any state, would be tantamount to accepting our own servitude tomorrow. This would be a mortal peril, especially as the 21st century is already witnessing major geopolitical upheavals that cast a permanent shadow of war and chaos over humanity. Faced with this situation, all we can do is hope that the Venezuelan people will be given a voice as soon as possible. It is they who must have the power to define, sovereignly and freely, the future they wish to create for themselves as a nation.”
Finally, Dominique de Villepin, trying to make a bid for the 2027 presidential election, on a platform open to the Global Majority, also condemned this “gunboat diplomacy”: “The United States is deliberately and indisputably placing itself outside international law by violating the Charter and the spirit of the United Nations. … No matter how detestable the overthrown governments may be, precedents show that regime changes lead neither to democracy nor to peace, but to chaos, civil war, and dictatorship. One need only refer to the situations in Iraq or Libya.”
