Like it or not, the 2027 presidential race is under way. I plan to post periodically on the race. The field is crowded, as Le Gorafi, the French equivalent of The Onion, noted when it published a gag poll reporting that “Ten Percent of the French Say They Are Not Running for President.” Some days it seems that this is not a joke.
The latest candidate to enter the race is the Socialist mayor of Saint-Ouen, Karim Bouamrane. Libération quotes an unnamed Socialist deputy who terms Bouamrane’s candidacy “ridiculous” and sees behind it the hand of the veteran PS operative and former First Secretary Jean-Christophe Cambadélis, who is said to have been a model for the title character of the TV series Le Baron noir about an energetic but highly unscrupulous political operator. The idea imputed to Cambadélis by this anonymous deputy is that Bouamrane is meant to be a stalking horse for François Hollande. By “creating chaos within chaos,” the implication is that the move is intended to sink the chances of Raphaël Glucksmann, Olivier Faure, and Bernard Cazeneuve in order to provide running room for the former president–a maneuver truly worthy of le Baron noir but perhaps too clever by half for ordinary voters to grasp.
But this little story takes us deep into the weeds. For readers less attuned to the minutiae of the race, a good starting place is this Substack by the estimable Philippe Marlière, always a lucid commentator on French politics. Marlière begins by observing that the left is “disunited and historically weak.” That is, if anything, an understatement.
Nevertheless, one faction of the left, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise, is feeling very smug about its chances at the moment in the wake of a hugely successful campaign launch in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis, whose recently elected mayor is the Mélenchoniste Bally Bagayoko. Saint-Denis and its new mayor typify what Mélenchon has taken to calling la nouvelle France, the France of visible minorities, of immigrants and descendants of immigrants, who he hopes will turn out in large enough numbers to enable him to make it to the second round of an election in which most observers agree that one of the winners is already destined to be the candidate of the Rassemblement National, most likely Jordan Bardella but possibly Marine Le Pen if she wins her appeal of a guilty verdict in a case of misappropriation of public funds.
Despite his 74 years, Mélenchon was at the top of his rhetorical form at the June 7 event. “On est chez nous!” he proclaimed to a crowd consisting of the very people to whom the RN regularly refers as being “pas de chez nous.” Insisting on the composite, heterogeneous nature of “the new France,” Mélenchon cleverly twisted the common phrase “on fait feu de tout bois” to give it new meaning: “On fait France de tout bois.” Countering the xenophobic party he hopes to defeat in a great showdown next May, he made it clear that he regards every “new” French citizen to be fully the equal of the old. The enthusiastic crowd returned the favor.
The problem for Mélenchon is that his consistently polarizing rhetoric alienates as effectively as it mobilizes. Polls show that more voters regard LFI as a potential threat to democracy than take that view of the RN. He has taken the right-wing idea of “the great replacement” of natives by immigrants and turned it back on his opponents: his ambition is “à incarner la nouvelle France, celle du grand remplacement, celle de la génération qui remplace l’autre parce que c’est comme ça depuis la nuit des temps.” But in his effort to gain the allegiance of alienated ethnic and religious minorities, he has made himself a vociferous and implacable opponent of what remains of NATO and the Western alliance; he has emulated Jean-Marie Le Pen’s habit of making insinuations about Jewish-sounding names, and accusations of antisemitism continue to dog him. If he is the non-RN candidate who survives to the second round in 2027, there may this time be no “republican front” to prevent the RN from coming to power. This is not an idle speculation but a real possibility. At the moment, it looks like the RN’s surest path to power is a successful Mélenchon candidacy.
Mélenchon’s rally was not the first of the campaign. That was Gabriel Attal’s, the former Macron protégé and now bitter Macron enemy, who is nevertheless running a campaign reminiscent of Macron’s, with an emphasis on youth, dynamism, and slick production values. The event did not generate much momentum, however. Next up is Raphaël Glucksmann, who has scheduled a rally in Aubervilliers this Saturday, June 13. The event will inevitably invite comparison with Mélenchon’s, and the likelihood is that this will not be to Glucksmann’s advantage: he is not a natural campaigner or fluent orator, and his natural consistency is less inclined to vociferous demonstration than Mélenchon’s. But perhaps he will surprise us. Tomorrow will tell.