Marine Le Pen's Verdict Lands Tuesday, and France's 2027 Race Just Shifted
The presidential election dates are official, the RN is bracing for two outcomes, and a new poll has François Hollande leading a divided left.
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This week
🗳️Presidential Election date announced
⚖️Le Pen’s verdict lands this Tuesday
🌹Hollande leads in a divided left
🗳️Presidential Election date announced
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Let’s start the week off with the most important news: the French government has now confirmed that the 2027 presidential election will take place on 18 April and 2 May.
The dates were formally endorsed by the Council of Ministers on 1 July. Article 7 of the Constitution requires the vote to fall between twenty and thirty-five days before the end of the president’s term, and that’s what actually did the choosing here: Macron’s second mandate began on 14 May 2022, leaving the government exactly two workable pairs of dates: 11 and 25 April, or 18 April and 2 May. It took the second.
Naturally, this is modern France, so both ends of the political spectrum found something to dislike. That’s usually a sign a decision was reasonably balanced.
The far-right Rassemblement National’s Sébastien Chenu called it “a manoeuvre of the president,” arguing that voting the day after the 1 May marches, which carry their own political charge, sits badly with the campaign’s silence period.
LFI’s complaint runs the other way: its own officials are frustrated at losing their highest-turnout mobilisation day to electoral purdah the day before the vote. Roughly 34 political figures have already signalled interest in running, and as of this week, neither the bloc central nor the traditional right has settled on one name between them.
Worth remembering why the field is this open in the first place: Macron is constitutionally barred from a third consecutive term, with Article 6 capping a president at two consecutive mandates. So, for the first time since 2017, there’s no incumbent on the ballot at all.
Plus, getting onto that ballot is its own hurdle, and a bigger one than any poll number.
How you actually get on the ballot
Candidates for the presidential election need 500 signatures, known as parrainages, from elected officials across at least 30 départements or overseas collectivities, with no more than a tenth of them from any single département.
While this reads like paperwork, this is the rule that will do the actual work of thinning a field of roughly 34 names, long before anyone casts a vote.
The left has its own date to add to the calendar: a primary scheduled for 11 October 2026 meant to produce one joint candidate. The problem: bigger names like Raphaël Glucksmann have already confirmed they won’t take part, while the Socialists’ Olivier Faure keeps defending the idea regardless.
The presidential election date now sits alongside three major questions: the RN’s succession issues, resolved one way or another this coming Tuesday; a right and centre that still can’t agree who’s meant to be occupying that space in ten months and what they plan to do; and a left primary process that hasn’t secured the participation of everyone it’s meant to unite.
⚖️Le Pen’s verdict lands this Tuesday
Moving over to the far-right, Marine Le Pen will only need to be left in limbo for three more days.
The Cour d’appel de Paris will rule on Tuesday 7 July 2026 on whether Marine Le Pen’s conviction for embezzling European Parliament funds holds, and with it, whether she will legally be eligible to run in 2027.
The prosecution has already hedged its own bet. The first-instance sentence, handed down in March 2025, took effect the moment it was read out in front of the country: five years’ ineligibility, four years in prison with two served under an electronic tag, and a €100,000 fine. February’s appeal demand kept the ineligibility and the fine, halved the custodial term served under a tracker, and dropped the request for immediate execution altogether.
Le Pen has already served 15 months of that ineligibility period; a sentence of 2 years or less would make her eligible again on 31 March 2027, weeks before the first round. Legal scholar Camille Aynès rates an outright acquittal “extremely unlikely,” given how thoroughly both trials established the funding system.
Le Pen isn’t banking on the arithmetic either way: she’s said she’ll draw her own conclusions the moment Tuesday’s ruling lands, without waiting on the Cour de cassation. “I’m not afraid,” she told LCI earlier this week, displaying bravado as she faced the end of her career.
Le Pen and Jordan Bardella closed ranks at a joint appearance in Liévin over the weekend. A fresh Odoxa poll finds that 74% of French voters say disqualification wouldn’t durably weaken the RN. Bardella now edges Le Pen in favourability for the first time, 40 to 39, which, to my mind, matters more than the disqualification question itself.
If she’s barred, the handover won’t happen at once. Party officials are pointing to an autumn launch for Bardella, intended to buy the RN a season to manage a divergence that’s already causing them problems: Le Pen still wants the retirement age back at 62, while Bardella has spent months softening the message for employers wary of the bill.
Whichever name ends up on the ballot in 2027, the funds at the centre of Tuesday’s ruling were European money, and the RN continues to be hammered with investigations.
🌹Hollande leads in a divided left
Moving over to the left, this week’s most interesting poll turns on a name that hasn’t declared anything.
An Elabe poll for Les Échos published Friday puts François Hollande ahead of the rest of the French left for the first time since his 2017 exit, at 46% favourability among left-wing voters. François Ruffin follows at 45%, Raphaël Glucksmann at 42%, and Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Fabien Roussel tied at 41%.
Now, Holland isn’t currently a declared candidate, but he hasn’t ruled it out either. Les Échos itself frames this as “something happening around François Hollande” on the left. I’d put it differently: when the man forced out of politics by record unpopularity in 2017 tops the field a decade on, that’s a diagnosis of how unsettled the rest of the left still is, not a comeback story.
Grading on a curve
Ifop’s presidential barometer puts Hollande’s five-year average approval at 25%, the lowest of any president since the Fifth Republic began tracking it. He dipped to 13% in 2014, left office at 22% in 2017, and became the first sitting president to decline a re-election bid, judging the odds too poor to risk it.
The interesting fact here is that no former president has made it back onto a presidential ballot since: Sarkozy tried via the 2016 Les Républicains primary and was knocked out in the first round with 20.6% of the vote.
If Hollande gets there, he’d be doing something no one else in the Fifth Republic has managed.
Hollande himself isn’t discouraging the chatter. He’s kept up a steady run of interviews, op-eds and public appearances since leaving office, and Les Échos notes he’s sounding more openly ambitious even while stopping short of declaring. At 71, that reads as calculated: it keeps him relevant to every headline about a fractured left without exposing him to the arithmetic of an actual campaign. Whether that’s strategy or vanity depends on how the rest of this poll ages.
Widen the sample to all French voters, and Hollande drops to ninth place, at 25% favourability, behind Jordan Bardella and Marine Le Pen (tied at 38%, whichever of them is still standing after Tuesday’s ruling), Édouard Philippe (34%) and Marion Maréchal (33%), with Gabriel Attal, Bruno Retailleau and Gérald Darmanin filling out the top ten.
The right and centre are no more settled than the left they’d mock for this poll. Laurent Wauquiez has spent the past fortnight publicly needling Bruno Retailleau over polling below 10%, floating Édouard Philippe as the steadier option without quite endorsing him.
With the vote now fixed for 18 April and 2 May, every bloc, left, right and centre, is still running trial balloons instead of campaigns. That’s worth keeping in mind the next time one of these polls gets reported as candidate news.
Now, one important thing to raise about the former president, and what could cause an issue for Faure, is that Hollande opposes the primary itself, the same one the rest of the fractured left has scheduled for 11 October. Hollande has said that he’d rather see a “social-democratic” candidate emerge some other way.
So, topping a popularity poll while sidestepping the one mechanism built to produce an actual nominee looks like a bet that the mechanism collapses before he ever has to commit to it, and it seems like the wily former president is genuinely angling to be a saviour candidate following a bureaucratic failure.
Hollande may even be positioning himself as the responsible choice alongside far-left firebrand Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
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Wow, so Hollande is still alive and kicking? Comeback or?