One step after another. Last March, his victory in Nice - far from being obvious a few months earlier - propelled Éric Ciotti to the head of the fifth city in France, giving him control over his college of electors. At the end of September, the senatorial elections will renew part of the upper house. In the Alpes-Maritimes, a department which has 163 municipalities, five seats are at stake, today all held by elected Republicans.
The opportunity for the boss of the UDR, who is aiming to form a group in the Senate, to try to overturn the table again by having candidates from his alliance with the National Rally elected for the first time on his territory. “It’s Ciotti who is campaigning for the UDR-RN,” observes one of the opposing leaders, a sign that the new mayor intends to put all his political weight into the mix.
In the race for 2027, the first secretary of the Socialist Party (PS), Olivier Faure, will participate in the primary next October. He assures on BFMTV/RMC this Monday that he has already gathered the necessary sponsorships to compete. And pleads again for a broad scope: “I want a primary from Ruffin to Glucksmann”. The elected socialist also took aim at the former head of state, François Hollande, who could become his competitor. He accuses him of “seeking his way with a center-right alliance”. And tackles his social VAT proposal: "I did not commit to the PS to apply, fourteen years later, François Fillon's program."
Sunday evening, the national secretary of the Communist Party (PC), Fabien Roussel, formalized his candidacy for the Élysée. The national coordinator of La France Insoumise (LFI), Manuel Bompard, calls on communist voters on France 2 to get behind their leader, because “there is such closeness in the votes in the Assembly”. In 2022, Fabien Roussel had collected 2.2% of the votes, leading Jean-Luc Mélenchon - who missed the second round by 400,000 votes - to say that he was almost responsible for this non-qualification. “I hope it doesn’t happen again,” argued l’Insoumis, pointing out a “quite painful memory” for communist sympathizers. Before defending: “The problem is not the number of candidates, but the number of voters”.
Their opponents start to hope. What if the poison of discord had been inoculated into the National Rally? What if signs of “amateurism”, in the words of Bruno Retailleau this Sunday, could begin to shake the Le Pen electoral fortress? From the reminder of the intangible position on pensions, where Jordan Bardella opened the door to an evolution of this, to the different expressions on the ban on the veil, the start of the school year seems to be placed under the sign of divergences, both of lines and of people, within the RN; impression reinforced by allegations of tensions between the party candidate and the one who had prepared to replace her.
Seven months before the presidential election, Roland Lescure warns oppositions against a new budgetary crisis. Asked this Monday morning on RTL about the threats of censorship hovering over the 2027 budget, particularly from the Socialist Party and La France insoumise, the Minister of the Economy called on them for “responsibility”.
“The alternative is that we have no budget,” he warned. Such a scenario could, according to him, cause a sharp rise in interest rates and have direct consequences for the French: consumer credit more difficult to obtain, higher overdraft rates, or even more inflation. “When lenders lose confidence, we have to make real sacrifices,” insisted Roland Lescure.
The government must present its budget copy “at the beginning of October at the latest”. Bercy estimates that, without new measures, the public deficit could be around 6% of GDP next year, while the executive wants to reduce it to, “at worst”, 5%. Roland Lescure promises efforts on operating expenses, communities and the State, while ensuring that he does not want a new tax increase. “If we do nothing, we are going to the wall,” he summed up.
Bruno Retailleau only names him three times. However, it is the Constitutional Council that the boss of the Republicans (LR) is targeting in the constitutional reform project that he presented in the columns of Le Figaro. The LR presidential candidate wishes on the one hand to broaden the scope of article 11, so that a referendum can be called on any law. On the other hand, he proposes to “give the last word to the people” so that they can validate, as a last resort, a law censored by the Sages of the rue de Montpensier.
The President of the National Assembly Yaël Braun-Pivet, who said she was “totally opposed” to this project, was not mistaken. “For months and months, certain politicians have been attacking the Constitutional Council and our Constitution” but it is “our most precious asset,” she declared. A technical debate, which may seem very far from the concerns of the French. However, it is the power of the legislator and the sovereign people that are at stake, particularly on the very sensitive and omnipresent question of migration. Because over the years, the Constitutional Council has framed the action of the legislator through ever more abundant case law, in this area in particular. “No major revision in this area can today avoid a constitutional reform,” once again underlines Guillaume Drago, professor of public law at Panthéon-Assas University.
The National Rally candidate for the presidential election, Marine Le Pen, defended on Sunday in a letter to tobacconists the “freezing of taxes on tobacco”, claiming to want to “protect” an activity “vital for the social life” of the municipalities. While the Confederation of tobacconists called for a “national mobilization” from Monday to “defend our local businesses and our territories” in the face of a rise in tobacco prices and the growth of the parallel cigarette market, the candidate for the Élysée addressed this sector in an “open letter” published by the RN on Sunday evening.
This mobilization “is completely legitimate”, she wrote, assuring that she wanted to “protect those who work legally, really fight those who organize trafficking, restore visibility to your profession”, a “vital” activity, according to her, “for the social and economic life of our towns and villages”. The leader of the RN deputies notably proposes two flagship measures on the economic side to “stop fiscal escalation”: “the freezing of taxes on tobacco and the deindexation of the price to inflation,” she said.
“The permanent increase in the price of tobacco cannot take the place, in itself, of public policy,” continued Marine Le Pen, who also intends to “strongly increase the sanctions against traffickers and street sales” and a strengthening of the prerogatives of municipal police officers so that they can in particular “participate in seizures of illicit products”.
The share of tobacco consumed in mainland France which escapes national taxation (TAFE) represented a tax shortfall of 4.3 billion euros on average in 2023, according to a customs study published in October 2025. According to a Senate report from May 2024, a pack of 20 “premium” cigarettes sold for 12.50 euros brought in 10.50 euros to the State (8.5 euros of “excise” on tobacco and 2 euros of VAT), compared to 1 euro to the tobacconist and 1 euro margin to the manufacturer.
One more candidate on the starting line on the left. The national secretary of the Communist Party, Fabien Roussel, formalized his candidacy for the presidential election on the TF1 news at 8 p.m.
To the great dismay of certain elected officials from his party and from La France insoumise, which accuses him of having prevented Jean-Luc Mélenchon from reaching the second round in 2022, the mayor of Saint-Amand-les-Eaux (North) is trying his luck again for 2027, after a vote by PCF members. In 2022, he only received 2.28% of the votes in the first round. In Saturday's Ipsos/BVA survey, he obtained between 2.5% and 3.5% of voting intentions.
Ségolène Royal, candidate in the socialist primary for the presidential election, announced on Sunday that she had obtained the necessary sponsorship to participate, congratulating herself on having “kept many friendships within the PS”. “I have the sponsorships. These are sponsorships (...) which represent very different sensitivities within the Socialist Party”, affirmed on LCI the former minister, aged 72, beaten in the second round of the 2007 presidential election. “I did not know that it would come so quickly, it proves that I have kept a lot of friendships within the PS”, she adds.
What role does she intend to play in this campaign? “I want to restore order and dignity to the France house which has been very damaged in recent years,” she summarized, without revealing many proposals at this stage. On Friday, traveling to the agricultural fair in Châlons-en-Champagne (Marne), she highlighted the fact that she had “nothing to prove”, “no political career to make”, unlike many contenders for the Elysée. Besides Ségolène Royal, six other candidates are declared for the primary, which will take place in two rounds on October 9-10 and 16-17: the boss of Place publique Raphaël Glucksmann; that of PS Olivier Faure; the socialist deputies Philippe Brun and Jérôme Guedj; the former mayor of Châteaudun (Eure-et-Loir) Fabien Verdier, and the leader of the small Republican and Socialist Left (GRS) party Emmanuel Maurel.
“A French extreme right which has the habit of subjugating our country.” It is in these terms that LFI MP Mathilde Panot described the president of the Rally Jordan Bardella, accused of having signed an agreement in principle with the leader of the British anti-immigration party, Nigel Farage. “I criticize him from abroad for sending a signal which lowers the voice of France,” she assured at the microphone of BFM/TV and Le Figaro. This text, she assures, provides that “we will recover the people rejected by the United Kingdom. (...) We are not barrier guards, subcontractors from the United Kingdom.
Mathilde Panot calls for “welcome with dignity” and “open legal channels with the United Kingdom” and denounced “all the lies that are told about migratory subversion which does not exist in our country”. “France welcomes 0.44% of new people each year, which is on average 1% in the OECD. Most migrations are between countries in the South,” she recalled, citing in particular Lebanon, where “a quarter of the population is immigrants”.
Government spokesperson Maud Bregeon, who supports the candidacy of Edouard Philippe, called on Sunday Gabriel Attal and Bruno Retailleau to abandon their presidential ambitions "as soon as possible" and to line up behind the mayor of Le Havre, best placed in the polls to beat Marine Le Pen.
“We cannot afford to wait too long”, we must come together “as soon as possible”, urged the minister to the center and right-wing contenders, particularly Gabriel Attal and Bruno Retailleau.
The boss of Renaissance, largely left behind in the last Ipsos/BVA poll by Edouard Philippe (7.5% against 14.5% in the first round if they are both on the starting line), is increasing the number of trips and does not intend to throw in the towel, open to the idea of a primary of the right and the center and to a possible rally in January or February.
“I think it’s excessively late,” replied Maud Bregeon, highlighting “the danger the country is running” with a possible second round between Marine le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon. “I would like things to settle down more quickly. I would like very quickly to have a single candidate,” concluded Maud Bregeon.
