With Marine Le Pen banned from running for president, the French establishment may feel that it can breathe easily once again. Yet a new Ifop Opinion poll — the most comprehensive survey yet of voter opinion — should terrify the mainstream parties.

At this stage, we don’t know who the leading candidates will be in 2027. Emmanuel Macron can’t run again, Le Pen is in legal limbo, the Left is divided, and the French conservatives are in an even worse state than their British counterparts. To make sense of the chaos, Ifop has tested a range of scenarios involving different candidates.

The most important finding is that the National Rally (RN)’s Jordan Bardella — who has confirmed that he will run for president if Le Pen’s ban is upheld — is just as popular as she is, if not more so. For the first-round vote, the poll shows him well ahead of the centrist and Left-wing candidates in all scenarios.

Of course, what really counts is the second round, in which the two best-placed candidates from the first round go head-to-head. The candidate most likely to beat the 29-year-old Bardella is the avuncular former prime minister Édouard Philippe. According to Ifop, the two men would split the second round vote 50:50. This dead heat is a chilling prospect for the French establishment, but Philippe does better against Bardella (or Le Pen) than anyone else. For instance, if Bardella’s opponent were Macron mini-me Gabriel Attal then the Right-winger would win by four percentage points.

So for those who want to stop the populist Right, it’s a no-brainer: it has to be Philippe. But there’s a complication. The pro-Macron bloc is an alliance of three main parties — and Philippe leads Horizons, the most conservative of the trio. Attal, on the other hand, is a former socialist who belongs to Macron’s Renaissance party, which is bigger than Horizons and somewhat further to the Left.

If Attal stands aside for Philippe, then the second round would be contested between a moderate conservative and a Right-wing populist, which is a dismal prospect for liberals and Left-wingers alike. What’s more, running Attal would give Macron a chance of securing his legacy — and that of En Marche, the movement which turned French politics upside-down in 2017 and kept Le Pen out of power.

However, Attal might not even make it to the second round. With Ifop giving him no more than 14% of the first round vote, he could be overtaken by another candidate. If Left-wing voters do their usual thing and coalesce around Jean-Luc Mélenchon, then the run-off would pitch the hard Left against the hard Right.

Who would prevail in this nightmare for moderates? In 2017, a run-off scenario between Mélenchon and Le Pen was polled, projecting an overwhelming victory for the former. But Ifop’s polling for a 2027 run-off between Mélenchon and Bardella reveals a complete turnaround. This time it’s the Right-winger with a two-to-one advantage.

Le Pen might take some consolation from this shift. While Mélenchon has alienated moderate opinion, her strategy of detoxifying the Right has been vindicated. She may be forced to sit out the next election, but her chosen successor has a strikingly high chance of winning it.

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Peter Franklin is Associate Editor of UnHerd. He was previously a policy advisor and speechwriter on environmental and social issues.

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