Seven Chairs, One Frame: The French Presidential Casting Call Already Happened

In late August, at the annual gathering of French employers, the news channel LCI aired “2027: Seven Candidates Face the Bosses, the Medef Debate.” Seven chairs, seven ambitions, a well-worn routine. Commentators dissected the soundbites, the dodges, the report cards on each performance. Almost nobody asked the only question that interests me: who picked the seven, and by what criteria?

Because a choice was made. Not every declared candidate was on that stage, nor everyone openly preparing a run. It is hard even to connect the selection to anyone’s past electoral results. This is not an accusation of bad faith: a private network and an employers’ federation may invite whomever they please, and that is entirely their right. The problem is not the invitation, it is the repetition. When the same operation recurs from one broadcast to the next, from one poll to the next, the shortlist eventually comes to look natural. A private editorial decision then presents itself to viewers as the objective state of the race. That is the sleight of hand.

The Ballot Ratifies, It Does Not Choose

In April 2027, voters will find a dozen ballot papers laid out at their polling station, as in 2022 and 2017. They will feel that they are choosing. In reality they will be ratifying a shortlist assembled far upstream by a stack of filters, none of which bears their name.

The first filter is the invitation. To be on the Medef stage is to exist; to be absent is to have to prove that you exist. The second is polling: institutes test only the names already established, and establishment is measured by, well, media presence. The circle closes neatly. The third is airtime, allocated “equitably” outside the official campaign period, which is to say in proportion to a representativeness itself largely manufactured by prior exposure. I have already said what I think of the drift of the authority meant to guarantee this pluralism, and I will not repeat myself. The fourth is the five hundred sponsorships, published in full since 2016: a mayor who sponsors a divisive candidate now knows their name will be posted for all to see, and many prefer to sponsor nobody at all. Each filter, taken alone, is defensible. Stacked together, they amount to an invisible round of voting, with no ballot box, no booth, and no appeal.

To these structural filters, blunter locks are sometimes added, and I have already written what I make of a disqualification enforced before the appeals are exhausted. Today’s subject lies elsewhere: even without a judge, the sieve works perfectly well on its own.

Real Disagreements, a Single Frame

Let us be fair to the seven, because caricature would be too easy. On debt, pensions, nuclear power, immigration, and the treatment of business, they do not tell the same story, and voters are right to consider those disagreements decisive: depending on which ballot goes into the box, French lives will not be the same. Reducing this panel to seven clones would be lazy punditry, and I refuse to do it.

What I observe is something else. Those disagreements, real as they are, unfold entirely inside a frame that nobody on that stage thinks to question. We stay in the European Union, we keep the euro, we preserve the institutional architecture. The argument is lively, but it is an interior argument: they fight over the furniture, never over the walls. And those walls were explicitly rejected once by universal suffrage, in 2005, before being reinstalled by parliamentary vote three years later. Twenty years on, the one rupture that ever won a national vote still has no champion among the candidates deemed presentable. That is not an accident of casting. That is the casting.

Missing From the Menu: Three Orders of Magnitude

Now let us look at who is absent, while avoiding the opposite trap of lumping everything together. The missing do not all carry the same weight, and the nature of the scandal changes with the scale.

First order of magnitude: mass demand with no one to carry it. Restoring the death penalty draws the approval of nearly one French citizen in two, poll after poll, with a consistency that spans decades. The last figure to champion it head-on from the front rank was Jean-Marie Le Pen; his daughter first softened it into a promise of a referendum, then quietly replaced it with life without parole. That an opinion of this magnitude has had no major standard-bearer since is not a detail. It is a representation deficit in its purest chemical form.

Second order: the minority idea abandoned by those who might have carried it. Outright withdrawal from the European Union remains a minority position, granted. But the instructive part is not its polling score, it is its abandonment. Those who could have championed it shelved it, among other reasons because the system of filters described above taught them that championing it cost media existence. The visible price of Brexit, the technical trap of the euro, the electoral calculations after 2017, and the internal transformation of the National Rally did the rest; I do not claim to isolate a single cause. But the filters weighed on the outcome, and when candidates tune their platforms not to their voters but to the conditions of access to the studio, casting no longer selects only people. It rewrites platforms.

Third order: the genuine niches. Restoring the monarchy, that marginal but persistent nostalgia I wrote about last year, or repealing same-sex marriage. I will not pretend that an opinion held by two percent is worth an opinion held by forty-five; that would undercut my own argument. But a menu is also judged by its margins, and we are regularly offered candidates polling at one percent when they tick the right ideological boxes, while other niches never make it through the door. At the other end of the spectrum, a sharp break in immigration policy or a challenge to birthright citizenship are not niches at all: they command a substantial electorate, and yet they reach the debate only through its edges, carried by candidates promptly filed under “unacceptable,” never from the presentable center of the stage. So the criterion is not electoral weight. It is compatibility with the frame.

Read me carefully here: I am not defending this catalog, and readers of this blog will find plenty to place me on several of these questions. Some of these ideas strike me as dated, others as dangerous, others as simply folkloric. That is beside the point. A democracy is measured not by the refinement of the dishes it serves, but by the breadth of its menu.

The Case That Tests the Argument: God and the Republic

There is one example I want to treat separately, because it is the most demanding on my own argument: reopening the settlement of 1905, the separation of church and state whose revision very likely matters to a portion of believers.

Signals of spiritual demand are not lacking. In the United States, Catholicism is advancing strikingly on campus: according to data compiled by the Hallow app across some sixty universities, participation in adult conversion programs jumped 115 percent in a single year, enough for Fox News to make it a national story in late August. Let us keep a cool head about it. This is a surge among young people and students, not a national realignment, and calling it “the conversion of the United States to Catholicism” would be hyperbole. But the phenomenon reaches France too, and here the figures are official: 13,234 adults were baptized at Easter 2026, up 28 percent in a year, a number that has more than tripled in a decade according to the French bishops’ annual survey.

Should we conclude that a “concordat” candidate is missing from the lineup? Honestly, no, not so fast. The secularism of 1905 is absent from the studios not through a casting oversight but because it rests on a hard, deep consensus, shared by a large share of believers themselves. One may regret that. One cannot treat it as a producer’s oversight. And it is precisely this borderline case that sharpens the argument. The question is not whether an absence results from a lockout or from a sincere consensus. The question is whether the consensus remains open to reexamination. A consensus willing to step back into the arena from time to time, and to win there, is a collective conviction. A consensus that can no longer even be posed as a question is a dogma, however popular it may be.

Choices That Have Become Dogmas

That, at bottom, is the claim I am defending, and it depends on none of the examples above. A democracy that never lets certain questions reach the ballot turns political choices into dogmas. The test is not “are these ideas good?” The test is: can they be beaten fairly, or only ruled out in advance? A bad idea that loses an election has been refuted. An idea excluded before the election has merely been censored, and it keeps intact the prestige of forbidden causes.

This test cuts in every direction. It applies to the European Union, which the centrist bloc would like to remove from debate permanently. It would apply just as fully to a radical right dreaming of locking in its own gains, or to a radical left wanting to make certain totems irreversible. Anyone who refuses to let their convictions return to the arena is confessing they do not believe they could defend them there.

And there is a price for refusing the exercise. An idea deprived of a ballot line does not vanish: it sours, it hardens, and it ends up contesting not this or that policy but the legitimacy of the entire system. I will not pretend that record abstention rates are explained by a narrow slate alone. The conviction that voting changes nothing, the complexity of the issues, and sheer fatigue with the same familiar faces all contribute as much. But a narrow slate feeds every one of those causes, because a menu offering only variations on the frame confirms precisely that voting will not change the frame. The candidates put before us thus each contribute, in their own way, to sustaining a corroded and exhausted system, not through what they propose, but through everything they tacitly agree never to propose.

What I Am Asking For Between Now and April

I am not asking for the moon. I am asking for three things, and none of them costs anything.

That debate organizers publish their selection criteria before the broadcast, and stick to them. A polling threshold, a number of sitting legislators, a lottery among declared candidates, it hardly matters: a stated criterion can be criticized, and is therefore honest; a secret criterion is a form of power, and is therefore suspect.

That polling institutes test support for ideas, not only for the faces handed to them. We might discover that French political demand bears rather little resemblance to the supply placed in front of it.

And that each of us, finally, stop commenting on the match and start commenting on the team selection. I have set out elsewhere why parties lock down the competition and how other voting systems would disarm tactical voting; media casting is the third stage of the same rocket, and it is the only one nobody talks about.

In April 2027 we will be told once again that the presidential election is the great appointment between one man, or one woman, and the French people. That will be true. But the appointment will have been booked by others, in offices the people do not enter, months before the first ballot is cast. The scandal is not that LCI and Medef assembled their panel. The scandal is that we have stopped asking to see the casting sheet.