Raphaël Glucksmann on Saturday put French and European sovereignty at the heart of his potential presidential campaign, as he gave himself a few more weeks to decide whether to officially run in France’s 2027 electoral race.

Nine months away from France’s next presidential election, candidates are starting to announce their candidacies and launch their campaigns.

Raphaël Glucksmann, a member of the European Parliament, hasn’t yet officially launched his bid, but tested the waters in a meeting on Saturday evening.

“Our enemy has a face. And he has a name. His name is Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Zhang Yiming,” he said, referring to the CEOs of SpaceX, OpenAI and ByteDance, the company behind TikTok.

“Macron didn’t understand a thing about environmental issues”

A centre left-wing politician, Glucksmann leads his own party, Place Publique, but has often allied with France’s Socialist Party, with which he ran in the last two European elections.

In his speech on Saturday, he said that France has “become a society of rentiers and heirs again” and that his “mission will be to rebuild a republic of workers”.

Glucksmann is sometimes compared to Emmanuel Macron, the current president, who first ran for the offfice under his own centrist party in 2017, after serving as economy minister in socialist François Hollande’s government.

“I’ve always known that Emmanuel Macron didn’t understand a thing about environmental issues, and that we were going to waste 10 precious years,” Glucksmann said, looking to differentiate himself.

He also positioned himself as an adversary to the far-right Rassemblement National, whose historical candidate Marine Le Pen is awaiting a court decision that will determine whether she can participate in the race. Another MEP and the president of the party, Jordan Bardella, is readying himself to take her spot if needs be.

Glucksmann wants to embody “the camp of true patriotism,” he said, accusing the far-right of being “Trump and Putin’s lackeys”.

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