\u201cPast presidential elections have shown that two candidates can\u2019t coexist on the left without causing trouble for each other,\u201d said Erwan Lestrohan, research director at French polling institute Odoxa.<\/p>\n
The two men could hardly be more different. M\u00e9lenchon is a 74-year-old hardliner who has run for president three times, nearly making the runoff in 2022 with a campaign calling for hiking the minimum wage, lowering the retirement age to 60 and pulling out of NATO.<\/p>\n
Glucksmann, 46, is an MEP and staunch supporter of bolstering Europe\u2019s military power. He is also open to billions of euros worth of spending cuts to bring France\u2019s messy public finances into line and believes the country\u2019s contentious pension system should be rebuilt.<\/p>\n
Given those ideological fault lines, the tone of the contest has unsurprisingly descended into mudslinging. On his preferred communication outlet \u2014 his blog \u2014 M\u00e9lenchon has described Glucksmann as a \u201cfanatic warmonger\u201d and \u201cthe darling child of media vacuity.\u201d<\/p>\n
Punching back on social media and in interviews, Glucksmann has called M\u00e9lenchon \u201ca phony patriot who prefers the Kremlin\u2019s spin\u201d and has framed their showdown as a struggle for \u201ca vision of democracy,\u201d accusing the leader of the hard-left France Unbowed party of rose-tinted views of authoritarian regimes in Moscow and Beijing.<\/p>\n
Peril in the polls<\/p>\n
Over recent weeks, poll after poll has suggested the far right could well have to face a leftist in a run-off in the spring of 2027. <\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s a solid prospect of having a left-wing candidate make the second round,\u201d Lestrohan said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cPast presidential elections have shown that two candidates can\u2019t coexist on the left without causing trouble for each…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":606549,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5309],"tags":[33,2000,299,95665,1105,36,38,33181,43,31930],"class_list":{"0":"post-606548","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-france","8":"tag-elections","9":"tag-eu","10":"tag-europe","11":"tag-far-left","12":"tag-far-right","13":"tag-france","14":"tag-french-politics","15":"tag-jean-luc-melenchon","16":"tag-macron","17":"tag-raphael-glucksmann"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/606548","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=606548"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/606548\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/606549"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=606548"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=606548"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=606548"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}