PARIS — Fresh off his dominant victory in a center-left primary over the weekend, French presidential candidate Raphaël Glucksmann slammed U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to ease restrictions on Russian diesel exports as a move that benefits the Kremlin at Europe’s expense.
“There is, at the head of the United States, someone who is either a useful idiot or an agent of the destruction of European strength and freedom,” Glucksmann said at POLITICO’s Competitiveness Summit in Paris. “[Russia’s war against Ukraine] targets us directly, us Europeans, and we are alone.”
The MEP also insisted that sending his far-right rival Marine Le Pen to the Elysée Palace in 2027 would be a victory for Russian leader Vladimir Putin and a step toward “the defeat of the European continent.”
Le Pen has previously expressed “a form of admiration” for Putin, and her party, the National Rally, received a loan from a Russian-linked bank in 2014. Le Pen said her party borrowed money overseas because French banks refused loans and that the loan had no impact on her political stances. The party has since paid back the funds.
Though Le Pen condemned Russia’s all-out war in Ukraine, some elected officials within her party remain strongly opposed to helping Ukraine and favor a stronger relationship with Russia.
At a POLITICO event last month, Le Pen said she believed France could provide Ukraine with military training and assistance but could no longer afford financial support given France’s budgetary constraints.
Le Pen currently boasts a double-digit lead over her competitors for the first round of next year’s presidential election, according to POLITICO’s Poll of Polls. Glucksmann is in fourth, trailing former Prime Minister Edouard Philippe and far-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon. France’s presidential election will go to a runoff if neither of the top two candidates gets more than 50% of the vote in the first round.
In his interview with POLITICO, Glucksmann, one of the race’s strongest pro-European voices, doubled down on his support for a European Sky Shield for Ukraine and the need for a more robust, sovereign European defense industry — a push also endorsed by French President Emmanuel Macron and widely shared across the French political spectrum.
“For decades,” Glucksmann said, “we have delegated our sovereignty and our security to Washington, and we are now realizing what a mistake that was.”
In practical terms, however, Europe remains split over whether non-EU countries should be allowed to tap its defense money. France is leading the push to limit the outsiders’ access to the European Competitiveness Fund.
Glucksmann also said Europe should take on joint debt to fund defense projects — a proposal Germany and other fiscally conservative EU members have been loath to consider — instead of attempting member-state-to-member-state projects like the failed Franco-German next-generation fighter jet.
Without joint investment, he said, “no European countries, including Germany, will be able to face, in the short term, the war of the future” against powers like China, Russia and the U.S.
“It’s a life or death question,” Glucksmann said.
Wars abroad, protests at home
In a sweeping interview, Glucksmann outlined how his foreign policy, if elected president in April 2027, would involve strengthening ties with countries in central and eastern Europe instead of courting leaders like Putin or China’s Xi Jinping.
The next president, he said, “should go to Warsaw; should go to Tallinn,” rather than Beijing or Moscow. The MEP has frequently criticized Macron for hosting Putin at a lavish ceremony in the Versailles Palace in 2017 and offering Xi a tour of his grandmother’s village in southwest France in 2024.
The center-left candidate said Europe needed to “leverage its position of strength” when it comes to negotiations with China, with whom the bloc is trying to reduce its €1 billion-a-day trade deficit. He also said that the EU should stick by its goal of phasing out combustion engine vehicles by 2035 and invest in electric vehicles so as not to “abdicate” the sector to the Chinese.
Glucksmann is pitching himself to voters as a French president who will confront what he considers to be strongmen at the head of global powers like Xi, Putin and Trump.
With the presidential campaign under way, Glucksmann is also looking to strengthen his credentials on the domestic front. He said recent protests by high school students — which center, among other grievances, on the lack of substitute teachers in France, overcrowded classrooms and the run-down state of several schools — are “perfectly legitimate and justified.” He also argued that teachers are underpaid.
