French Presidential Election: Too Many People for Just One Seat

The French are just over a year away from the next presidential election. Officially, the campaign will not begin until the autumn. Yet there are increasing signs that the race has already begun. Never before have there been so many potential candidates, making the outcome extremely uncertain—and the influence of pollsters all the more significant.

The proliferation of candidates is a direct consequence of the crisis facing traditional political parties on both the Left and the Right.

On the Left, the Socialist Party, which until just a few years ago held the position of the leading and governing party, faces competition from Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s party, La France insoumise (LFI), whose excesses of all kinds—violence, antisemitism, communitarianism—are putting it under severe strain. Given these excesses, reaching agreement on a single candidate has become extremely difficult, as the March local elections demonstrated. Consequently, even though a certain discipline in favour of a single candidate has traditionally prevailed on the Left for a long time, such unity seems an unattainable ideal for the 2027 election. The problem is that, faced with Mélenchon’s thunderous personality, no one really manages to assert themselves, which casts doubt on the potential candidacies of the various contenders. The party’s current first secretary, Olivier Faure, lacks any charisma. MEP Raphaël Glucksmann sees himself as his party’s hope but speaks only to an urban minority. Within the Socialist Party, some are beginning to dream of a return to the political stage by François Hollande, the former President of the Republic replaced by Emmanuel Macron in 2017, though widely discredited in his time—and the main figure responsible for launching his disastrous successor.

On the Right, the Les Républicains (LR) party is suffering from a similar crisis. The party’s current president, former Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau, has just been triumphantly elected by his members as their presidential candidate. His dithering and his murky dealings with the Macronist camp have seriously dented his credibility as a champion of authority and a return to order. His only consistency lies in his stubborn refusal of any alliance with the parties of the national right. In early April, he explained to the press with exasperation that he was “fed up” and clearly rejected any form of union of the right before declaring that Zemmour and Le Pen would undoubtedly be “his opponents.”