Election campaign to replace Macron heats up

With the end of France’s summer vacation season, the election campaign to replace Emmanuel Macron as president next May is bursting to life.

An unusually large and broad field of candidates is forming to lead the European Union’s largest country, its second-largest economy and only nuclear-armed power, their appetites whetted by the fact that Macron is constitutionally barred from seeking a third consecutive presidential term himself.

Some won’t get the support they will need from sponsors and their political camps to be on the starting line when the first round of voting is held on April 18, 2027.

Still, a crowded field could boost far-right candidate Marine Le Pen — just as it did for Jean-Marie Le Pen, her father, in 2002. The record 16 candidates splintered the first-round vote, creating an electoral earthquake when the elder Le Pen qualified for the decisive second round.

Socialist Party leader Olivier Faure became the latest to declare his candidacy this weekend. He joined more than two dozen others who say that they intend to stand or are contemplating a run in 2027.

After decades of trying, first by her father and then her, Marine Le Pen’s fourth campaign for the French presidency is already shaping up as the strongest opportunity for her nationalist, anti-immigration National Rally party to take power.

Such an outcome would rock the European Union, putting a politician who has long been hostile to the bloc of 27 nations and many of their collective rules and policies in charge of one of the EU’s most important countries.

“It’s clearly a crucial election, just because the far right might win this one and it never was the case before,” said Gilles Ivaldi, a researcher at the Paris-based Sciences Po university who specialises in populism and radical right-wing politics.

“With Le Pen as president, we know that the EU will be weakened. To what extent we don’t know, but we know she’s against the EU,” he said. “This would create a lot of instability.”

Polls have for months suggested that Le Pen is the frontrunner and could possibly sail into the winner-takes-all runoff on May 2 as the first-round vote leader, which would be a first for her. She trailed Macron in the 2017 and 2022 first-round voting and then lost decisively to him in round two.

It was a giant upset when her father qualified in 2002 for round two. His associations with people who collaborated with France’s Nazi occupiers in World II and his multiple hate-speech convictions, including Holocaust denial, made him anathema to many voters.

This time, it would be a giant upset if his 58-year-old daughter doesn’t advance. Marine Le Pen has worked for years to distance herself from his extremism. She’s already begun reaping the fruits at the ballot box: Since 2024, her National Rally has become the largest party in the parliament’s powerful lower house.

She got another boost in July when a Paris appeals court cleared her path for another presidential campaign by shortening a ban on seeking elected office that a lower court had handed down to Le Pen for embezzlement.

With Le Pen widely expected to secure one of the spots in the decisive second-round duel, the battle for the other is becoming hard-fought, its outcome highly uncertain.

For now, Le Pen’s strongest opponents include veteran far-left and anti-capitalist firebrand Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who hopes to make his first runoff after placing third in 2022 and fourth in 2017 and 2012, and two former prime ministers under Macron — Edouard Philippe and Gabriel Attal, both centrists.

Other prominent possibilities include conservative former Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau and multiple figures from the mainstream left, including European Parliament lawmaker Raphaël Glucksmann and Ecologists leader Marine Tondelier, campaigning before the expected birth within weeks of her second child.