Pressmediaofindia
Related Articles
27-05-2026
PARIS: A year to go until France chooses its next president, the big question is who can save the election from being a battle of the extremes.
For now and perhaps only for now, the answer is pretty clear. It is President Emmanuel Macron’s former Prime Minister, Edouard Philippe.
Latest opinion polls concur that the 55-year-old Centre-right politician is the only figure capable of beating a hard-right candidate in round two of the vote next May, whether that is Marine Le Pen or her young deputy Jordan Bardella.
In any other polled scenario, the other candidate would lose and France would have a populist-right head of state.
Philippe is also best placed to keep the hard-left candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon out of the run-off, thus eliminating the scenario, a nightmare for business and France’s European partners of a straight choice between hard left and hard right.
For supporters of Philippe, who heads the small Horizons party, all this should justify his emergence in the coming months as the natural candidate of the French Centre-right and set him on course for victory.
They expect other contenders from the same political space to acknowledge Philippe’s lead towards the end of the year and step diplomatically from the race.
Those rivals include the former centrist prime minister, Gabriel Attal of Renaissance who declared his candidacy on Friday and Bruno Retailleau of the conservative Republicans.
In the peculiar French system of voting, everyone knows that having too many players in the multi-candidate first round of the presidential election next April amounts to political suicide.
With several candidates vying for the same slice of the electorate, the vote is divided up and all fall below the qualification mark for round two in which only the two leaders from round one take part.
This was already true in the old politics, where Socialists and Gaullists used to battle it out. How much more true is it now, when historic formations of right and left are being eclipsed by populist forces on their flanks?
So, with a year to go, Edouard Philippe is cautiously moving his campaign into gear mindful that being an early favorite in the presidential race is as often a hindrance as an asset.
In a meeting in Reims east of Paris earlier this month, he announced his three campaign directors as well as a distinctly Gaullist election slogan, France Libre (Free France).
Leaning clearly to the right on economic matters, he favors a further pushing back of the age of retirement from its current 64, and a law to enshrine balanced budgets. Both issues could be the subjects of early referendums if he is elected next year.
In June he plans to hit the news with an innovative communications stunt beaming himself into 1,000 living rooms across France for a mass “apartment meeting”. And on 5 July in Paris, he holds his first rally as a candidate.
As Le Monde newspaper said in a profile, Philippe “hopes that a face-off between him and the National Rally (RN) quickly gets accepted as the framework of the election, with himself as the natural barrier to the far-right coming to power”.
The problem is, of course, that there are so many imponderables between now and next May, and the interim is unlikely to play out as smoothly as Philippe supporters would like. First of all, there is no guarantee that his rivals in the Centre-right space will do the honorable thing and step aside.
Even if they do, they will probably maintain their campaigns as long as possible, opening up divisions with Philippe that will be exploited by his real opponents. (Int’l Monitoring Desk)
