Marine Le Pen has now officially thrown her hat in the ring; Jordan Bardella has been relegated to second place in the binôme that she announced last night would present itself to the French people. The gauntlet has been thrown down. Who is best positioned to pick it up?
Jean-Luc Mélenchon has dreamt for nearly five years that he would finally be tapped to confront Le Pen in what will surely be the last outing for both of these perennial candidates. The success of his campaign launch and the disarray of the rest of the left has had many commentators speculating that this ultimate “cage match” between populisms of the left and right would be France’s melancholy fate in 2027. Is this realistic?
The polls suggest otherwise. I have set up a website on which I will eventually post a compendium of current polling from across Europe. (For now only French and German results are reported, but others will be added in due course). A glance at the French chart shows the RN at 34%, followed by Philippe at 18, Mélenchon at 14, Attal at 13, Glucksmann at 11, Retailleau at 10, and Zemmour and Tondelier both at 4. (The chart shows a smoothed 21-day moving average of all available polls, with individual results indicated by the faintly colored dots). While it is true that Mélenchon leads the left, there is virtually no chance that rival left-wing candidates such as Glucksmann (or Hollande, Cazeneuve, Faure, Tondelier, Ruffin, Roussel, etc.) will drop out in his favor. No one on the left is willing to coalesce with him, let alone anyone further to the right, where his name is radioactive: he is farther beyond the pale than the Communists were in the 1960s. My judgment is that he won’t make it to the second round.
Philippe, by contrast, has reserves. He and Attal will almost certainly not both remain in the race. One will bow to the other. The great unknown is the potential for scandal to disrupt Philippe’s candidacy. The details are too tedious to recount; suffice it to say that Philippe stands accused of virtually the same offense that until yesterday threatened to sideline Le Pen: misappropriation of public funds. In his case, the investigation is still at an early stage, but a steady drip of revelations will not help his candidacy. Nevertheless, he is the strongest of the candidates in this part of the political spectrum. Laurent Wauquiez’s recent overtures in his direction suggest that Attal voters are not his only reserve: Retailleau’s 10 percent will also divide, with the lion’s share going to the RN but a smaller fraction ready to follow Wauquiez.
So what will Philippe run on? Two things: experience and character. Character, you ask. On June 18, Philippe rather pretentiously, not to say portentously, issued an appel intended to evoke the memory of de Gaulle. Published in Le Grand Continent and entitled, redundantly enough, “Le moment gaullien de l’Europe,” Philippe builds his call to action around three points: integral sovereignty, democratic non-alignment, and the capacity to say no. Actually, the three points–Philippe is French after all, so every essay must be constructed around three points–collapse into one. Times have changed. The erstwhile American ally has become an adversary. The opposition between national and European sovereignty is sterile. With the “weaponization of interdependence,” to borrow a phrase from political scientists Henry Farrell and Abe Newman, sovereignty needs to be exercised à géométrie variable, depending on whether the challenge is military, technological, financial, or economic. Hyperbolically, Philippe asserts that “the General” refused “to accept the least modicum of American sovereignty on French territory after the Liberation.” In his dreams, perhaps. Nevertheless, Philippe correctly senses that the United States is attempting to alter the forms and terms of its hegemony, and he is calling, as de Gaulle’s self-appointed heir, for France to develop a viable strategy of resistance. He is hardly alone in this. European leaders have talked of nothing else since the Trump administration began unleashing its various strikes against the status quo. Still, his move to establish a position on this new battleground, bloated and pretentious though his essay is, is the first sign of serious engagement with the substantial stakes of the next presidency.
Whether any of this will matter in the actual as opposed to the ideal campaign remains to be seen. To date, la politique politicienne has crowded out all serious discussion of the issues, and there are simply too many candidates for anyone’s views to be heard. Philippe deserves credit for laying down a marker, but I’m not sure he has the political skills to insert it into the discourse beyond the readers of Le Grand Continent, whose numbers are probably insufficient to elect anyone mayor of Le Havre let alone president of France. Philippe also suffers from the serious drawback that he is, to a degree only slightly less than Attal, une créature de Macron, which is not a good thing in today’s France, where Macron’s unpopularity may be enough to sink any candidate plausibly tied to him. Philippe is actually more a derivative of Juppé and his wing of the UMP that was. But no one remembers Juppé any longer, or how bold it seemed at the time for Macron to absorb a whole swathe of the center-right by choosing his first prime minister from the Juppéiste camp.
Indeed, Philippe’s campaign launch meeting harked back to his Juppéiste roots. He promised to make “our children’s interest” the “compass” of his campaign. Now, whenever a conservative evokes the interests of “our children,” one can be sure that the real goal is to reduce deficit spending at the expense of benefits and to pursue “structural reform” for the benefit of capital over labor. This is red meat for the center-right voter, much more so than the rather airy ideas of integral sovereignty, democratic non-alignment, and so on. But the general needs his foot-soldiers, and just as de Gaulle was capable of uttering the words “Vive l’Algérie française!” when he needed to, Philippe is capable of saying “Vive l’austérité! Vive la réforme structurelle!” These hollow commitments won’t matter if he wins. “On s’engage, puis on voit,” as Napoleon said.