Macron: Orion 26 "clear signal" to adversaries; French Army swamped with recruits
France's largest military exercise since the Cold War wraps up, the new voluntary national service scheme is oversubscribed on day one, and the Socialist leader calls for a unified left ahead of 2027
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This week
🪖Young people rush to national military service
🌹Faure pushes for a single left-wing candidate
🇫🇷Macron: largest French military exercise since Cold War “a clear signal”
🪖Young people rush to national military service
To start the week off, it turns out that the French Army isn’t scrambling for recruits so much anymore.
With the new voluntary National Service scheme now coming into effect, targeting 3,000 volunteers aged 18–25 this year (2026), before scaling up to 42,500 by 2035, many people were concerned that even the small initial goal would be hard to reach.
And yet, pretty much immediately, the new scheme is oversubscribed at the starting gate.
“Today I have more than 2,300 applications, including 1,600 young people waiting to be assessed and 260 already directed towards a place,” General Arnaud Goujon, the Army’s deputy director of recruitment, said on 27 April, with around 22% of applicants being women.
Candidates had until April to apply, and those selected will join the ranks this autumn for a ten-month stint. Each individual taking part in this will receive a monthly salary of €800, with housing and other day-to-day costs covered by the military.
“There is no doubt at this stage that there will be young people in sufficient numbers,” said Army Chief of Staff General Pierre Schill, describing the gap year programme kicking off in September, October, and November, designed specifically to allow all participants to return to any advanced education programmes the following summer.
One interesting detail stands out from the reports that we’ve seen: 90% of applicants asked to be placed in combat units (cavalry, infantry, artillery, engineer corps) despite the Army having “an enormous number of other roles” in logistics, intelligence, and maintenance, as Schill noted.
General Goujon offered a diagnosis of this in an interview with Le Point on 1 April. “Generation Z is often misunderstood. Young people from that generation are often seen as ‘lazy and half-hearted’ by employers. In reality, these young people are looking for meaning, a framework, a collective, solidarity and adventure. The Army meets all these expectations and speaks to them as adults,” he said.
There are also several other major reasons why young people are keen on combat roles: the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine, the American threats to invade Europe through Greenland under President Donald Trump, and the simple fact that many young people are looking for meaning in their lives.
🌹Faure pushes for a single left-wing candidate
With a year to go before the Presidential election, the left-wing candidate pile-up is apparently getting on First Secretary Olivier Faure’s nerves, and he decided to say something about it this Thursday 30 April.
Speaking on RTL, the Socialist Party leader once again argued for a single candidate from the non-LFI left. “I don’t want us to repeat what we’ve already been through three times,” he said, invoking the 2002 debacle when Lionel Jospin (PS) was knocked out early, and Jean-Marie Le Pen (FN) walked into the second round against Jacques Chirac (RPR). “Five, six, seven left-wing candidates in the first round, none in the second, and the far right takes our place,” he warned.
It’s been clear for a while that Olivier Faure wants a primary, but there’s a major debate across the left about how this would work logistically, how many candidates should be allowed to participate, and, on top of this, whether La France Insoumise should be included or excluded.
Naturally, Faure’s PS wants them gone, while some smaller parties, like Marine Tondelier of EELV, who has benefited from a weaker centre-left, would like them there as a counterweight to the growing power of the Parti Socialiste, which risks overshadowing her party even more.
However, Faure would still have his work cut out for him: François Hollande, whose popularity appears to be seeing some increase, recently confirmed that he’s preparing a 2027 run.
Could Faure step aside for the former president who is currently ahead of him in the polls? Not currently, and he doesn’t seem too worried either.
“I doubt he’s the one who’ll bring everyone together — but I have no problem with anyone, as long as they go through a selection process everyone understands. A primary.”
- Olivier Faure responding to a question on François Hollande’s candidacy in 2027
For the Socialist leader, “we can’t keep demoralising the French people by multiplying ambitions,” rattling off other expected opponents for the Elysée: Bernard Cazeneuve, Raphaël Glucksmann, François Ruffin, and Clémentine Autain.
“At some point we need to agree on how to get there,” Faure added, once again underlining that he wants a single candidate from what he calls “the reformist, democratic, and ecological left”, with LFI firmly outside that perimeter.
In the meantime, Olivier Faure received the experience of all Presidential hopefuls, having a bag of flour thrown at him as one does.
🇫🇷Macron: largest French military exercise since Cold War “a clear signal”
To cap off the week: Emmanuel Macron declared Exercise Orion 26 a “success” on Thursday, watching the final phase unfold in eastern France and calling it “a clear signal sent both to our allies and to our adversaries.”
For the uninitiated: Exercise Orion 26 is France’s largest military exercise since the Cold War: a three-month, multi-domain drill running from 8 February to 30 April 2026, designed to prepare French and allied forces for high-intensity warfare in Europe.
Built around a fictional scenario in which France leads a coalition to defend the country of “Arnland” against the expansionist “Mercure”, which is a not-so-thinly veiled nod to Russia, the exercise covers land, sea, air, cyber, and space domains across fifteen metropolitan departments.
Orion 26 involved 12,500 troops, 25 ships including the Charles de Gaulle carrier strike group, 140 aircraft, 1,800 tactical vehicles, 30 helicopters, and 800 combat drones.
It also involved forces from 24 countries, including several European partners: Belgium, Italy, Spain, Greece, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg.
Speaking at Suippes in the Marne, French President Emmanuel Macron said it had demonstrated “the credibility Europeans have to deploy together an operation of this scale. And France’s ability to be a framework nation in this context.” It was, he added, “a very clear message sent to our Ukrainian partners, who are waiting for us on this front, and to all our European brothers in arms.”
Over the course of the day, Macron visited the divisional command post overseeing the push to retake territory from a fictional enemy.
He observed several key military activities during the assault: infantry machine-gun fire from a fortified trench position, the now-famous Caesar artillery fire suppressing the enemy, and new mortars recently brought into service by the French army. He was also shown the Army’s latest equipment and brand-new hardware made possible by recent military programming laws under his presidency.
“What I saw today is an army that is advancing, transforming, modernising, and that is here to meet the contemporary challenges we face,” he said. “That is why this exercise is so important, and you can be proud of having contributed to it.” France must be “a power recognised by its allies, feared by its enemies,” he added.
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