France Arming Europe as Politics Shift Against EU

For one week in June, France looked once again like the natural leader of Europe. Emmanuel Macron hosted the G7 at Évian-les-Bains, where the Iran war was formally wound down and the Ukraine file dragged back up the agenda. He widened France's nuclear umbrella into something close to a continental guarantee. And on the edge of Paris, Eurosatory — the largest land-warfare arms show in the world — opened its halls to some 2,600 exhibitors from 68 countries, all circling the same question: how fast can the West rearm before the next war finds it. By any traditional measure it was a French triumph. The trouble is that the polls, the same week, named the man most likely to inherit all of it — and he wants to pull France out of the project it is being built to lead.

The strategic centrepiece was the nuclear announcement. Macron increased France's warhead stockpile for the first time since 1992, stopped disclosing its size, and opened an "advanced deterrence" framework to eight partners — Germany, Poland, Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Greece, Sweden and Denmark — raising the prospect of forward-basing nuclear-capable Rafales on allied soil and, for the first time, German troops taking part in French nuclear exercises. It is the boldest attempt yet to give Europe a deterrent of its own as Washington signals its retreat; Pete Hegseth spent the same days in Brussels announcing a six-month review of US forces in Europe. But Paris keeps the trigger to itself — no sharing, no delegated command — which is why even sympathetic analysts at Chatham House describe the offer as a complement to the American umbrella rather than a replacement. France is extending leadership, not a guarantee.

Eurosatory made the ambition tangible and the strain visible in the same breath. The halls at Villepinte were full of French hardware built for a rearming continent: Thales and Renault unveiling plans to mass-produce Toutatis loitering munitions by the thousand, MBDA showing a land-launched cruise missile and a drone swarm, Naval Group its Rampart close-in weapon. France used the show to make a political statement too, having barred Israel from a national pavilion and limited Israeli firms to defensive systems only. Yet the same days exposed the cracks in the Franco-German motor that is meant to drive all of this. KNDS rolled out a stopgap "CAPINT" tank precisely because the joint Franco-German MGCS main battle tank is running years behind, and Airbus moved to cut Dassault's role in the Eurodrone programme amid signs of a French pull-back. Europe's two largest powers cannot yet build a tank together, even as they prepare to deter Russia together.

Against that backdrop the domestic ground was shifting hard. A new poll put Jordan Bardella, the National Rally's 30-year-old president, at roughly 35 percent in the first round of the 2027 race, more than fifteen points ahead of the next contender, the former prime minister Édouard Philippe. Bardella spent the week sharpening the contrast with everything Macron was doing abroad, calling the European Union "completely obsolete" and pledging to halve France's contribution to it. The European Council on Foreign Relations, in a study of what an RN presidency would mean, argued that the real danger to the EU is "less immediate withdrawal or obstruction than gradual divergence" — which is exactly the problem for a European-defence project that needs a decade of steady French commitment to amount to anything.

And the National Rally's own path is unsettled. Marine Le Pen remains barred from running pending an appeal ruling due July 7; Bardella, her designated heir, faces a separate case that could end in the same disqualification. France's largest party, leading every poll, could enter the 2027 campaign with no eligible candidate. It is meanwhile exploiting the rawest wound in French politics — the murder of 11-year-old Lyhanna, whose funeral drew crowds on June 12 and whose suspected killer had been accused of raping a child the previous August and was never questioned. Justice Minister Gérald Darmanin apologised for a "huge failure" and ordered a review of 70,000 child-abuse complaints, but refused to resign; an RN spokesman, Nikolic, joined the calls for his head. The left, for its part, spent the week hunting for a way back into contention: mayors of four cities called for unity around a common 2027 project, even as La France Insoumise launched an online game to rally support for Mélenchon.

The rest of France's week filled in the portrait of a country at once outward-facing and unsettled at home. Macron prepared to host Trump at a Versailles dinner for the 250th anniversary of American independence, and Giorgia Meloni for a first bilateral at Antibes on June 25. Parliament passed a reparations law for the children once uprooted from Réunion, and lawmakers struck a deal on an anti-fast-fashion bill aimed at Shein and Temu. France's long retreat from the Sahel kept exacting its price: a French intelligence officer was sentenced to 20 years in Mali amid surging anti-French feeling, and Air France permanently shut its Mali operations.

The week leaves France somewhere genuinely new and genuinely precarious. It is making itself the spine of European defence — the nuclear power, the arms supplier, the G7 host, the bridge to a departing Washington — at the very moment its electorate drifts toward a party that regards the whole European edifice as obsolete. The first answer comes on July 7, when a Paris court decides whether the front-runner's party will even have a candidate to field. The deeper answer will take longer, and it is the one that should trouble Europe's planners most: a continental defence built around France only holds if France still wants to lead it in 2027.