Glucksmann triumphs in the primaries. Now he must unite the French left

Paris. It took just one round for Raphaël Glucksmann, leader of Place Publique, to be crowned the social-democratic bloc’s candidate for the Élysée. On Sunday evening, the MEP secured 66.17 per cent of the vote in the first and only round of the moderate left’s primaries – a landslide victory over his four rivals, starting with the First Secretary of the Socialist Party (PS), Olivier Faure, the big loser of the primaries, who managed a meagre 14 per cent. A victory that reshapes the political balance of the left and launches him with credibility into the race for the 2027 presidential election. “No, Marine Le Pen will not be at the Élysée in 2027. Tonight, the battle for France begins,” Glucksmann promised his supporters after the results were announced, presenting himself as the “candidate for social and fiscal justice, the ecological revolution and democracy”, calling for a “break with Macronism” and attacking “Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s hegemony over the French left”.

It is his consistency that has been rewarded by social-democratic voters, who have instead penalised Faure for his excessive ambiguity towards Mélenchon’s France insoumise, a party with increasingly radical positions and an ambiguous stance on anti-Semitism. As founder of Place publique – a movement born outside the old Socialist Party apparatus and built around a strongly pro-European, environmentalist and social-democratic identity – Glucksmann embodies what the PS has long lacked: the idea of being able to represent a left capable of speaking to an electorate that extends beyond the party’s traditional boundaries, drawing support from the broad liberal centre – that moderate electorate without which one cannot win the presidential election. But this is precisely where the hard part begins: the PP leader is called upon to forge a coalition around his candidacy that unites all the non-Mélenchonist left-wing parties, from the Greens to the French Communist Party. “Together we will breathe new life into the democratic left,” he stated yesterday on France Inter, when asked about the Greens and the rather frosty reaction of their leader, Marine Tondelier.

“I want to work together. And I cannot imagine a better leader than Jadot to drive the ecological transition within a government. I cannot imagine them not joining us,” continued the PP frontman, referring to Yannick Jadot, a member of the liberal wing of the French Greens who had already endorsed Glucksmann at the end of August and is at odds with Tondelier. Glucksmann does not wish to exclude anyone, neither Faure – “I want him to be part of this campaign,” he said – nor the man who continues to be a thorn in his side and has not yet definitively ruled out the possibility of standing for re-election at the Élysée, former President François Hollande.

"I want him to be part of our team, to join our common struggle," said Glucksmann. He believes we must act swiftly to avoid repeating the mistake made by Benoît Hamon in 2017, the then Socialist Party candidate who wasted weeks on political negotiations and deals that cost him the credibility he had earned during the primaries. “We are well aware of this precedent,” Glucksmann’s team assure us. That is why they had prepared the layout of a leaflet in advance in the event of a first-round victory. “Printing of the leaflet began at 10.00 pm” so that distribution could start in Paris as early as Monday and “across the whole of France by the weekend”, the social-democratic candidate’s entourage told Libération. The first copies of the 50,000 planned – featuring Glucksmann’s profile crossed out by the words ‘Tout commence maintenant’ – left the printers at 5.00 am, even before dawn. This was to ensure not a single minute was wasted, given that Mélenchon and Le Pen have been campaigning for some time now. It is the ‘intern’s’ revenge – as Ségolène Royal, the former presidential candidate who secured just over 7 per cent of the vote on Sunday evening, had contemptuously labelled him on the eve of the election.