This is really the home stretch!  The first round of the presidential election is this Sunday, April 10 and the second and final is on April 24.

Today my huge packet arrived in the mail with all of the candidates’ programs and my voting card.  I’m ready!

With so many candidates it’s hard for all of them to get air time and get their programs across.  Here is a quick guide to the 4 women and 8 men running for President of France in 2022.

Far Left

Jean-Luc Mélenchon

The oldest candidate in the 2022 presidential election, Jean-Luc Mélenchon (born August 19, 1951 in Tangier, Morocco, then French protectorate), first joined a Trotskyist movement, Organization Communist Internationalist (OCI), after the civil unrest in May 1968. Former socialist minister (in the early 2000s), he presents himself under the colors of his own party, La France Insoumise (Unbowed), and currently leads among left-wing candidates in opinion polls, at around 12 percent of intentions to vote

In 2017, he came in 4th position in the presidential election but with a very high score less than 2% behind Marine Le Pen.  After he refused to urge his supporters to vote against the far-right candidate Marine Le Pen who was facing Emmanuel Macron, he became one of the fiercest opponents of the new president.

He is a political veteran known for his tirades against globalization and the “elites,” Mélenchon enjoys a fervent base of supporters who say traditional Socialists have lost touch with voters outside large cities.

France’s political landscape has shifted to the right, Mélenchon will probably struggle to match his success in 2017, when he obtained almost 20 percent of the vote in the first round.

Fabien Roussel

Fabien Roussel ( April 16, 1969) is the offspring of a communist household. The charismatic leader of France’s Communist Party has seen his poll numbers mount in recent weeks.

Roussel has promised to increase taxes on companies and the highest earners to pay for pay raises for teachers, nurses and other low-pay professions, and to nationalize big banks and energy giants.

Jean Lassalle

At 66, this is his second candidacy. Son of a shepherd in the Pyrenees, this agricultural technician surprised everyone in 2017 when he ran for president (he obtained 1.2% of the votes). His “Resist” party wants to reduce the European Commission’s role in French affairs, and encourage more young people to revive the countryside as a “Grand National Cause”.

His program revolves around local trade and the defense of local producers.

He sings songs from his region at the National Assembly, has done a hunger strike, did a tour of France on foot… Jean Lassalle is a specialist in stunts. He is an elected official since 1977, he was first mayor at age 21, then deputy. 

Nathalie Arthaud

Nathalie Arthaud ( February 23, 1970) is a Trotskyist economy teacher campaigning for the Workers’ Struggle party.  Arthaud is seeking the presidency for the third time. 

She wants to raise the minimum wage to 2,000 euros ($2,180) per month, outlaw job cuts by companies and lower the retirement age to 60 from 62.

Philippe Poutou

Philippe Poutou (March 14, 1967) was a blue-collar factory worker at a Ford plant near Bordeaux until 2019 when the site was shut down. Poutou is standing for the New Anti-Capitalist Party with a campaign promising to disarm the police and rebuild France’s public administration after years of budget restrictions.

Poutou ran for president in 2012, and again in 2017 (He received 1,09% of the votes).

Green 

Yannick Jadot

Yannick Jadot ( July 27, 1967) started his career as an activist for various NGOs until he joined the French branch of Greenpeace in 2002. He became a member of Les Verts, the French green party Europe Ecologie Les Verts (EELV) and was elected as a Member of the European Parliament in 2009. The French green members chose him to run for president in the 2017 election, but he withdrew from the race to join the PS candidate, Benoît Hamon, who won only 6,3% of the vote, the lowest score achieved by his party since its creation in 1969. In November 2021, Jadot narrowly won his party primary. 

Former Greenpeace campaigner Jadot is hoping to transform the success the Greens enjoyed in local elections in 2020, saying the French are ready to embrace an environmental revolution.

He is pushing what he calls pragmatic policies to combat climate change instead of the more radical ruptures sought by some in his party, including an end to France’s reliance on nuclear power.

Socialist

Anne Hidalgo

Anne Hidalgo (born June 19, 1959, in Spain), became a French citizen in 1974. She started her career as a civil servant (labor inspector) and joined le Parti Socialiste (PS) in 1994. Hidalgo was a staffer for various ministers during the socialist government of Lionel Jospin, until she became the deputy mayor of Paris in 2001. In 2014, she was elected mayor of Paris, her current position. She has used it to gain a national profile even though Paris’s debt ratio has risen significantly under her leadership. After several promises not to enter the presidential race, especially during the 2020 local elections, the PS members, in October 2021, chose her as their candidate to run for president in the 2022 election.

The Socialist Party has been floundering since Hollande abandoned any attempt to seek a second term in 2017, after becoming one of the most unpopular presidents in recent history.  Hidalgo, who easily won re-election as Paris’s mayor in 2020, has promised a more inclusive form of governing for the nation along with across-the-board pay rises for low-income workers. But so far she has failed to replicate her popularity at the national level, with polls showing she might not even score five percent in the first round — the threshold needed to have her campaign spending reimbursed under French law.

Centrist

Emmanuel Macron

44 years old, second candidacy, current French president and current EU president. 

Wanting to be as inclusive as possible, Emmanuel Macron baptized his project and his campaign site “Avec Vous” (With You).

The former investment banker and economy minister under Socialist president Francois Hollande swept to power five years ago with a centrist platform and pledges to reform France’s economy and spur growth.

He has largely remained popular while presenting himself as the dynamic leader of a “start-up nation” reasserting itself on the European and global stage.

Yet Macron’s policies generated resentment among many who accused him of favoring the rich, and a fuel tax hike sparked the fiery “yellow vest” protests of 2018 and 2019 that forced him to make a series of tax and wage concessions.

Making France a more self-sufficient country is his key objective for the next five years.  He has plans to bolster the country’s agricultural and industrial independence, strengthen the army build more nuclear reactors.

Right

Valérie Pecresse

After brilliants studies (Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales, Ecole Nationale d’Administration), Valérie Pécresse ( July 14, 1967), joined Jacques Chirac’s presidency as a policy officer in 1998. She was elected as a member of Parliament in 2002  and appointed by President Nicolas Sarkozy as the Minister of Education in 2007 and Finance Minister in 2011. She was afterward elected president of the Île de France region (which includes Paris and seven departments. It is the most populated region of France) in 2015. 

She left her party (renamed Les Républicains, LR) in 2019 to denounce its rightward shift. But she changed her mind again in 2021 when she decided to rejoin LR to compete in the party’s primaries. Initially an outsider, she won the race in December.

Described as “hardworking”, “methodical” and “structured” Pécresse is a liberal right on both economic and social issues.

Right Sovereigntist

Nicolas Dupon-Aignan

Dupont-Aignan,(March 7, 1961)  the eurosceptic head of the Rise Up France party, is the mayor of the Paris suburb Yerres who has taken multiple runs for the presidency since 2007, and has scored in the low single-digits in his two previous runs.

He says his party is the true heir of General Charles de Gaulle and his push for French sovereignty and has promised to crack down on migration and give “a kick in the butt to the lazy, slackers and free riders” who take advantage of France’s social security system.

Far Right

Marine Le Pen

Marine Le Pen (August 5, 1968) is the daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen who founded in 1972 le Front National (FN), the main French far-right party since WWII. After working as a lawyer, she entered politics in 1989 as a candidate at a local election near Paris. She joined her father’s inner circle of advisors during the 2002 presidential election when he reached the runoff for the first time in the party history, but only to be soundly defeated by Jacques Chirac (who tallied 82% of the votes). During the regional elections in 2009, she led the FN to a strong showing in the north of France, a former left-wing stronghold. She then became the head of the FN when Jean-Marie Le Pen retired in 2010. Le Pen ran in the 2012 and 2017 presidential elections. In 2012, she finished a strong third in the first round of the election. In 2017, she reached the second round and obtained the highest result ever for a far-right party (she captured 33% of the votes) despite a disastrous performance in the presidential debate with Emmanuel Macron. 

Since then, she has shown her ability to withstand the impatience within her party at the price of minor adjustments (the FN was renamed Rassemblement National (National Rally) in 2018), but growing doubts about her remained and fueled the ambition of Eric Zemmour.

Le Pen has pledged to take France out of NATO and the US sphere of influence. She proposes the replacement of the World Trade Organization, and the abolition of the International Monetary Fund. Le Pen and the NF claim that multiculturalism has failed, and argue for the “de-Islamisation” of French society.

Eric Zemmour

Eric Zemmour ( August 31, 1958), a Jew of North African descent whose family emigrated from Algeria before the independence, embarked on a career in journalism in 1986 after two unsuccessful attempts to enter l’Ecole Nationale d’Administration, one of the main schools of the French elite. Initially close to Jean-Pierre Chevènement, a former member of the Parti socialiste who became a fierce critic of the European Union, Eric Zemmour was hired by the respected right-wing newspaper Le Figaro in 1996. He then became a prominent columnist, a TV pundit, and a successful writer known of his taste for provocation. 

He has been convicted of hate speech three times. Zemmour blames the decline of France on the influence of Islam and defends the nationalist conspiracy theory of a « Great replacement » of French natives by immigrants. After toying with the idea of a candidacy, he decided to run for the 2022 presidential election in December and to create his political movement, Reconquête!  His project is that the French “feel at home again”.

His opponents are the “right-thinking”, the “elites”, academics, journalists, trade unionists, as well as the “Islamo-leftists” and the proponents of “gender theory”. In recent weeks, he has also been singled out for his pro-Russian sympathies and his past remarks very favorable to Vladimir Putin.

To learn more about how the presidential election is run in France please see my article on the whole long process.

Also on a more local level here check out my article on the important role mayors in France play.