PARIS — Leftwing parties in France pledged to hold a primary race in October to select a single candidate for the 2027 presidential election, gathering at a Paris meeting hall to mark the 90th anniversary of the Popular Front. The Socialist Party leadership, the Greens, and several smaller groups committed to the joint contest, with hundreds of voters chanting "Unity! Unity!" through a rainstorm.

The Popular Front was a leftwing alliance formed in the 1930s to oppose the far right. In 2024, the New Popular Front alliance grouped leftwing parties together to oppose the National Rally in a snap parliamentary election that produced a parliament without an absolute majority.

Marine Le Pen's National Rally is the largest opposition party in the French parliament, and opinion polls indicate it is polling strongly ahead of the 2027 election. Members of the French business community who had previously avoided the party are now meeting publicly with its senior figures.

Under the French constitution, President Emmanuel Macron is ineligible to run for a third consecutive term in 2027. About 30 people, nearly all men, have expressed interest in running to oppose the National Rally.

The effort to field a united leftwing candidate has been complicated by fragmentation and by some figures preferring to run independently. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the 74-year-old leader of La France Insoumise, announced he will run for president for the fourth time after finishing third in 2022. Raphaël Glucksmann, a centre-left member of the European Parliament, is considering a bid. Presidential candidates in France must secure 500 endorsement signatures from elected officials to qualify for the ballot.

Paris MP Danielle Simonnet, addressing the gathering, said: "Voters on the left want unity – so let's cut the bullshit and build it." She said divisions on the left would allow the far right to cement its gains.

Antoine Bristielle, director of opinion at the Fondation Jean-Jaurès, said candidates needed to address voters' desire for an in-depth policy debate on social and economic issues. "The risk is that this presidential election focuses solely on rejecting the RN, a kind of strategic vote with the message: 'This person is the most central, the most consensual, maybe they can beat the RN' – even if that person is proposing nothing concrete and we don't know where they're going. That would be dramatic because it means that no in-depth policy issues would be settled," he said.

French voters' top concerns include healthcare access, cuts to the hospital system, the cost of living, and the social security system. An Ipsos poll last month found that 74% of French voters want either radical transformation or deep changes in France, a substantial increase over the past three years. Bristielle said the lack of socioeconomic issues in the political debate reinforced the idea that politicians were disconnected from voter concerns.

"There has been a real feeling of immobilism in France, namely since the start of Emmanuel Macron's second mandate," he said. "People want this presidential election to be a real democratic moment which settles the key issues for the future on the basis of tangible facts and clear directions put forward, but we're still very far from that."