French minister expresses confidence in electorate rejecting Le Pen

French minister for European Affairs, Benjamin Haddad, told EU News he’s “quite confident” the French electorate will reject extremism, and won’t elect a far-right candidate to replace President Emmanuel Macron in next year’s election.

His comments come days after an Elabe poll for BFMTV/La Tribune Dimanche showed Le Pen dwarfing all other candidates; predicting her to win between 34% and 35.5% of first-round votes.

Le Pen, the president of the far-right National Rally party, was cleared to stand in July despite an appeals court upholding an embezzlement conviction against her.

“We still have a long way to go before the election, but I’m quite confident that the French, like they’ve done so many, many times, will refuse extremism,” Haddad said on EU News’ interview programme 12 Minutes With.

“The French people have repeatedly said no to extremism, to euroscepticism, and populism,” he said.

He said next spring’s 2027 election will be “a tough one, like every election,” but added that he “never trusts the polls,” arguing that they have been wrong in the past.

“When I personally started supporting Emmanuel Macron in 2016, he was far, far behind in the polls,” said Haddad, who belongs to the same political party as Macron, Renaissance (formerly La République En Marche!).

Ahead of the 2017 elections, Macron rose from third position in the polls after he declared his candidacy in November 2016, to briefly polling ahead of Le Pen weeks ahead of the elections.

He gained 24% of the vote in the first round in April 2017, then won the presidency in the second round with 66% of the vote, in contrast with Le Pen’s 34%. This margin narrowed significantly in the second round of the 2022 elections, when Macron beat Le Pen with 59% of the vote to her 41%.

French are ‘deeply European’

Haddad said the French are “deeply European” and will ultimately reject Le Pen.

“The French are proud of the role that their country is playing on the European stage,” he said.

“Marine Le Pen, for a long time, has been the candidate of ‘Frexit’,” he said, referring to the demand by some on the fringes of French politics, who called for France to leave the EU and the eurozone.

The prospect of France leaving the EU was a strong component in Le Pen’s 2012 and 2017 manifestos. At present, she still maintains a staunchly eurosceptic stance, pledging to cut back on Europe’s contributions to the bloc and calling for the scrapping of norms, but no longer explicitly advocates for a referendum on France’s membership of the EU.

“She’s been the candidate [standing for] leaving the eurozone. She was the candidate of the alliance with Vladimir Putin,” Haddad said.

“She’s trying to make people forget about all of this and sometimes even says that it never happened, even though we know her stance on the European Union for a long time.”

Despite his conviction that the French public will vote against Le Pen, Haddad warned politicians from other parties should approach the rise of the far-right and populism “with a lot of humility.”

“Our first responsibility is to continue to deliver on results. All the issues that we’re discussing, from migration and security, from competitiveness, prosperity, from defending the security of Europeans against foreign threats, we have to continue to deliver on this, Haddad explained.

He went on to say that continuing to “campaign, to meet the French, to listen to voters, and to respond” is also central in this mission.

Uniting around one candidate?

The linchpin to his proposal to beat the far-right will perhaps be the most challenging of all to attain, given the fragmented nature of the race with eight months to go until the first round of elections.

“We need to unify around a candidate, because right now we have a lot of talent in the centre, but we have a fragmented political offer,” Haddad said.

Around 30 figures have already expressed their ambition to run. Two of those considered likely candidates are Macron’s former prime ministers: centrist Gabriel Attal (Renaissance) and centre-right figure Édouard Philippe (Horizons), while conservative candidate Bruno Retailleau (Les Républicains) is one of the President’s former Ministers.

On the hard-left, Jean-Luc Mélenchon (La France Insoumise) is vying to be President, while other candidates running on the left include Marine Tondelier (the Greens) and MEP Raphaël Glucksmann (Place Publique).

“I think by the end of the year we will have one candidate that can rally the centre and the centre-right and then we will make a case.” Some candidates have suggested they would consider partaking in a primary.

Extremism ‘not the answer to uncertainties’

Still, Le Pen remains the front-runner in the polls. In 2024, her party won the European Parliamentary elections in France with more than twice the number of votes of Macron’s party, pushing the president to call a snap election at the time.

Haddad conceded that global uncertainties fuel populism’s popularity, pointing to the fact that many of the certainties people had before “are crumbling.”

“Trade is being weaponised as a tool of pressure. You see China’s subsidised overcapacities coming to our markets and destabilising our industries. Our traditional alliances are being questioned; there’s the war of Russian aggression on our continent,” he explained.

“When you have these uncertainties, and the pillars on which we built our European Union and our transatlantic alliance are questioned, this very often paves the way for radical answers,” Haddad added, noting that he doesn’t believe those answers are right,

“I don’t think that in a world where you have the pressure from China, from the US, the threat coming from Russia, we would be stronger going it alone. I don’t think we’d be stronger looking inwards.”

The first round of the French presidential election will take place on 18 April 2027, while the second will be held on 2 May 2027 if no candidate wins a majority of votes.