French Presidential Election

French centre-left politician Raphaël Glucksmann has formally declared his candidacy for the 2027 French presidential election, confirming his intention to contest the Socialist Party primary this autumn.

Glucksmann, the 46-year-old leader of the centre-left Place Publique party and a member of the European Parliament, announced his bid on TF1's evening news bulletin. He stated that he would never form an alliance with Jean-Luc Mélenchon's France Unbowed movement should he win the primary. His candidacy will require his partner, journalist Léa Salamé, to step down from anchoring France 2's flagship news programme to avoid conflicts of interest.

Glucksmann enters a race in which Marine Le Pen currently leads first-round polling, with Mélenchon and Édouard Philippe already declared. Opinion polls credit Glucksmann with roughly 10–12% of voting intentions, while he secured 13.8% in the last European elections. The first round is scheduled for April 18, with President Emmanuel Macron ineligible to seek another term.

Jean-Luc Mélenchon opened his presidential campaign on Sunday, proposing a "conscription écologique" and vowing to censor the government's 2027 budget in a speech before 10,000 supporters in Châteauneuf-sur-Isère, near Valence.

The La France Insoumise leader, who turned 75 on Wednesday, also promised to force large fortunes and multinationals to pay taxes, back a European-style superprofits levy, and ask the European Central Bank to freeze state debts from the pandemic era. He called for transforming administrative regions into "écorégions" based on river watersheds. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu warned lawmakers against delaying the 2027 budget for electoral reasons, calling it "the choice of disorder."

The speech kicks off a busy political rentrée across France, with party summer universities and rallies scheduled through September, including a Medef debate on Thursday featuring seven declared or prospective presidential candidates.

French presidential candidate Édouard Philippe has proposed establishing a detention and return centre in East Africa to process irregular migrants overwhelming the Indian Ocean territory of Mayotte, placing immigration at the centre of his 2027 campaign during a two-day visit to the archipelago.

The former prime minister, who served under Emmanuel Macron from 2017 to 2020, plans to suspend asylum applications, birthright citizenship, and family reunification in Mayotte for the full five-year presidential term if elected. He also called for a broader moratorium on immigration pathways, including family immigration. Left-wing leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon dismissed the proposals as "aberrant, ridiculous, and provocative", prompting Philippe to invite him to witness the crisis firsthand.

Mayotte, a French department of roughly 323,000 people, is about half foreign nationals, mainly from Comoros, with additional asylum seekers from the Great Lakes region. A 2025 law already tightened birthright citizenship rules on the island.