Know your French rights
I’m back…
We don’t yet know the dates for next year’s French presidential election, but because of the expiry date on Macron II, it has to happen, on two Sundays a fortnight apart, sometime between 11 April and 2 May. My money, for the little it’s worth, would be on 11 and 25 April. Easter is early next year (28 March) so that doesn’t need to be taken into account. It seems unlikely anyone would want to trouble the French for the weekend of 1 May, although they don’t get a day in lieu on a Monday as the British do when a bank holiday falls at the weekend, so perhaps that doesn’t matter…
It is generally accepted that the election will (once again) be about who can beat the far-right Rassemblement National (RN) in the run-off. We do not yet know who their candidate will be. Last April, when Marine Le Pen was found guilty of misusing European parliamentary funds, part of her sentence was to lose her right to stand in elections for five years and with immediate effect (exécution provisoire), even with an appeal pending. Her appeal was heard in February this year and the verdict will be delivered in early July. It seems unlikely that the ban will be lifted. This might not matter, given that her protégé and RN president Jordan Bardella is currently scoring better than her in the polls. The ballpark figure for Bardella is around 36% to 33% for Le Pen. An article in Le Monde last weekend helpfully reminds us all of the perils and inaccuracies of polls at such a distance (Présidentielle: un an avant...) but this is what the other candidates are working to. (It’s worth looking at the figures if you can, because they underline a historical tendency for Le Pen to be over-scored, while the likes of Jean-Luc Mélenchon and even Emmanuel Macron are under-scored, but that’s a matter for another time.)
It’s a fragmented field on all sides of the political spectrum. I’ll start by looking at the French right and centre-right - aka the stupidest right in the world - and also invoking all the usual caveats at such a distance.
Last weekend (18-19 April 2026) the main right-wing Les Républicains (LR) party voted on how to designate its candidate. The party’s 76,000 members (down from 120,000 less than a year ago) were offered three options:
Endorse party president Bruno Retailleau as their candidate
Opt for an internal primary
Opt for a wider primary involving other centre-right and right wing candidates
By an overwhelming majority (74% on a 60% turnout), the membership endorsed Retailleau, the man who became leader in May 2025 after the tragi-comic end of his predecessor Eric Ciotti (of whom more later).
If the name sounds familiar, Retailleau, a senator from the Vendée and formerly the protégé of Philippe ‘Puy du Fou’ de Villiers, was interior minister under Michel Barnier and then François Bayrou, but threw his toys out of the pram last autumn when the new PM Sébastien Lecornu refused to appoint the LR’s François-Xavier Bellamy as education minister. (Bellamy would have been far too Catholic for France’s teaching unions and Retailleau knew it.) Retailleau returned to the Senate and just after the New Year formally announced what everyone already knew - that he would be running for President of the Republic. (Retailleau toyed with running in the LR primary in 2022, but stood down when confronted with the four-way contest between party heavyweights Ciotti, Barnier, Valérie Pécresse, and Xavier Bertrand. Ultimately Pécresse beat Ciotti in that contest, but went on to score a disastrous 4.8% in the election.) Politically, Retailleau is on the Catholic right of the party and will use his time as interior minister to frame his campaign as a ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’ and hardline on immigration candidate. Paradoxically, the decision does not preclude Retailleau from participating in a right-wing primary later in the year if such a thing were to be organised, but it ostensibly blocks the way for a rival emerging with the formal backing of the party, which, despite its fall from grace over the last decade, can still count on a large number of local councillors, as the recent municipal elections showed..
Not everyone in the party was happy with Retailleau’s manoeuvre. Laurent Wauquiez, whom Retailleau defeated in the contest to become party chief, and leader of LR’s 47 deputies in the National Assembly, has and continues to argue forcefully for a primary stretching from Macronists such as Gabriel Attal and Gérald Darmanin, via Macron’s former PM Edouard Philippe (who has his own Horizons party), through LR and even reaching out to the far-right Reconquête! (yes, there really is an exclamation mark) party of Eric Zemmour/Sarah Knafo. There are reservations within LR at including Zemmour, but a wider primary is the preferred option for the likes of Pécresse and Senate speaker Gérard Larcher. It is also the position of Michel Barnier, who is busy inviting anyone who will listen to participate in what he calls a ‘conclave’ (see for example L’Express 9-15 April 2026). Barnier’s view is that the centre-right/right ‘socle commun’ (common base) that has been governing France since the dissolution fiasco of June 2024 should devise a programme first, then find a candidate (perhaps M Barnier, que sais-je?)
And then there is the case of David Lisnard, the mayor of Cannes. Lisnard quit LR after a disagreement with Retailleau over the plan to select a single candidate for the party and also because of Retailleau’s failure to separate the party from Macronism. First elected to Cannes city hall in 2014, Lisnard was subsequently re-elected in 2020 and again in March this year, when he took 81% of the vote in the first round. Lisnard is, in some ways, the classic French local notable and in 2021 became president of the influential Association des Maires de France in succession to former right-wing poster-boy François Baroin. I first really came across Lisnard during the 2017 campaign, where he was one of the main spokesmen for François Fillon and then a year later when I was asked to review a book he co-authored with Jean-Michel Arnaud called Refaire communauté. Pour en finir avec l’incivisme, one of his trademark policies. Lisnard has his own (micro-) party, Nouvelle Energie, which sits on the neo-liberal wing of French conservatism and claims around 10,000 members, along with a handful of deputies and senators. In many ways, Lisnard’s policies echo those of Fillon, whose promises to cut 500,000 public sector jobs earned him the nickname of the French Thatcher. Lisnard’s point of reference is more contemporary: Argentine president (and lest we forget economist) Javier Milei (though perhaps without the chainsaw). Linard recently provided the preface to Michael Miguères’ hagiographic La Révolution Milei. Lisnard is not against the idea of a primary and believes that he has the charisma and the policies to emulate the unexpected emergence of Fillon in the 2016 right-wing primary.
The problem with primaries, as experience has shown, is that they can throw up the wrong candidate and invariably expose the very deep personal and political divisions within parties. They are what the French might call a ‘fausse bonne idée’.
A man who knows just how badly wrong primaries can go is Edouard Philippe, who was one of the organizers of Alain Juppé’s ill-fated campaign for the LR primary in November 2016. A year before the primary, Juppé was way ahead in the polls and seen as the man most likely, in an anticipated run-off with Marine Le Pen, to win the support of left-wing voters. The problem was that though he might appeal to the left in a presidential second round, he wasn’t appealing to the peuple de droite in their own primary. While we expected Juppé to have to slug it out with comeback king Nicolas Sarkozy, the party membership opted overwhelmingly for the third man, Fillon. With disastrous consequences. Philippe has made it clear that he intends to stand. The last piece of the puzzle fell into place for him with his comfortable re-election as mayor of Le Havre. The polls have him as the next best placed candidate after one or other of the RN candidates, on about 20%, but this is precisely where the Juppé experience, laid bare in Gilles Boyer’s Rase campagne matters.* Philippe needs to be seen as a bona fide right/centre-right candidate first before appealing to the left in a run-off. He has no intention of being drawn into a primary.
As one of Macron’s growing legion of former PMs, Philippe might yet be endorsed by Macron’s party, Renaissance (ex-La République en Marche), now led by another former PM, Gabriel Attal. He himself has ambitions, but might judge 2027 as too soon. So does the current justice minister Gérald Darmanin, but the same applies to him. It is also not certain that being the candidate to extend the Macron legacy will be much of a vote-winner. Centre-right politics in France - Renaissance, whatever is left of the Radical Party, but also the Union des Démocrates et des Indépendants (UDI) - is struggling to find space and a voice against a noisy backdrop.
So what does that give us? Going from centre to right, as a I see it: Attal, Darmanin, Philippe, Barnier, Lisnard, Retailleau. There is also Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, the neo-Gaullist souverainiste who Marine Le Pen famously announced would be her PM if she won the 2017 run-off. Despite losing his seat in the National Assembly to La France Insoumise in 2024, he was recently re-elected mayor for the small town of Yerres, to the south-east of Paris, and plans to run again. It’s not clear if Zemmour will run or if he will step back in favour of his partner, Sarah Knafo. Her performance in the municipal elections in Paris in March was a disappointment (for her anyway), but she is still being included in the conversation by most of the opinion pollsters. Xavier Bertrand, the social Gaullist president of the Hauts-de-France region might fancy his chances. And there is even talk of a comeback by yet another former PM, the 72 year-old Dominique de Villepin, whose Parti Humaniste, created in 2025, is seen as a platform for a run at the post he was touted for in 2007… And they wonder why Bardella has such appeal among les tchjeunes.
The French left is also fragmented, but in different ways…
*Boyer and Philippe are close friends and have co-authored a number of books about French politics and also political fiction in the Baron Noir/House of Cards genre.