Europe races to lock in deals before France's 2027 far-right risk

European capitals are no longer treating a far-right French presidency as a theoretical risk. With the 2027 election barely a year away, governments in Berlin, Brussels and Kyiv are accelerating agreements on nuclear deterrence, the EU's next seven-year budget and Ukrainian enlargement on the explicit assumption that Marine Le Pen or her protégé Jordan Bardella could occupy the Élysée Palace by May next year. The National Rally leads polling for the first round, and its platform, national control of France's nuclear arsenal, trade barriers inside the single market, a €2bn annual EU budget rebate and a referendum lock on any new member, would upend the assumptions on which European security and integration have rested for decades.

The nuclear scramble

The most concrete manifestation of this hedging is the quiet launch of talks between France and eight European partners, the nuclear-armed United Kingdom plus seven non-nuclear states, to come under a "forward nuclear deterrence" framework. Participants would join French nuclear exercises, cooperate on space-based early warning, air and missile defence, and long-range conventional missiles. The initiative is a direct hedge against the uncertainty introduced by Donald Trump's presidency and the United States' strategic pivot away from Europe, but it is also a race against the French electoral calendar. The National Rally insists France's deterrent is strictly national and not for sharing. If Le Pen or Bardella wins, the door closes.

Germany has moved fastest. Chancellor Friedrich Merz has declared his intention to take concrete steps with Paris before the end of 2026, including the creation of a bilateral nuclear strategy steering group and German conventional participation in French nuclear exercises. For a country that has relied exclusively on the US nuclear umbrella since the Cold War, this represents a doctrinal rupture. Berlin is effectively buying a second insurance policy. Merz's government is simultaneously deepening cooperation with Italy's Giorgia Meloni, a reminder that European leaders are hedging against a rogue Paris as much as against an unreliable Washington.

The Nordic states and Poland are going further still. Politicians and intellectuals in both regions have begun floating the idea of indigenous nuclear capabilities, a "Nordic nuke" and Polish nuclear self-reliance, as ultimate fallbacks should the French guarantee prove unreliable or the US umbrella disappear. Such programmes would take years, violate the Non-Proliferation Treaty as currently interpreted, and face immense political hurdles, but the fact they are discussed in serious forums measures the depth of anxiety.

Budget battle brought forward

The next multiannual financial framework, covering 2028 to 2034, has become another front. Jordan Bardella has echoed Margaret Thatcher's 1980s rhetoric, promising to march to Brussels and demand "France's money back" in the form of a €2bn annual rebate. The current council presidencies, Cyprus and Ireland, are pressing for a deal as early as possible, hoping to nail down the framework before French voters go to the polls. Brussels officials acknowledge the timeline is political, not procedural: a National Rally president would turn the budget negotiation into a crisis of legitimacy for the entire union.

France is the EU's second-largest net contributor after Germany. A €2bn rebate would either blow a hole in the budget or force cuts to cohesion and agricultural spending that would alienate central and eastern members. The Commission's draft proposals, expected later this year, will be scrutinised for how much flexibility they build in to absorb a French demand without unravelling the package.

Macron's institutional guardrails

At home, Macron has entered what aides privately call the twilight zone of his second term. He lacks a parliamentary majority, his government survives on ad hoc majorities, and a debt burden exceeding 110% of GDP denies him the fiscal room to match his rhetoric on strategic autonomy or massive Ukrainian support. Yet he retains the power of appointment, and he is using it systematically. Last month he installed his 40-year-old budget minister, Amélie de Montchalin, as president of France's Court of Auditors, an unsackable, open-ended post she could hold for nearly three decades until mandatory retirement. She will now sit in judgment over the high-deficit budget her own ministry helped craft.

Her predecessor, Pierre Moscovici, a former Socialist finance minister and European commissioner, was shuffled to France's seat on the European Court of Auditors. The pattern extends to monetary policy. Christine Lagarde, president of the European Central Bank, is reported to be planning an early departure before her term expires in October 2027, handing Macron the appointment of the next French member of the executive board for an eight-year term. François Villeroy de Galhau, governor of the Bank of France, has announced he will retire early to head a charity, vacating another six-year term in national banking supervision and European monetary policy.

"He's methodically putting guardrails in place," said a senior presidential supporter. "All outgoing presidents have rewarded key supporters with plum jobs, but this time it's different because of the risks before us." The strategy is to populate the independent authorities that constrain a future government's fiscal and monetary choices with officials committed to the European project and the eurozone's stability rules.

Ukraine's window to get under the wire

Kyiv's urgency on enlargement is driven by the same calendar. Under the French constitution, EU accession treaties require approval by referendum unless a three-fifths majority of both parliamentary chambers endorses them, a threshold almost impossible to reach in the current fragmented assembly. A National Rally president would almost certainly trigger the referendum route, where public opinion on further enlargement is at best lukewarm. Zelenskyy and his strongest EU backers are therefore pushing for a political decision to open accession negotiations in 2027, even if full membership with all rights and benefits follows years later. The goal is to make the process irreversible before a potential Le Pen or Bardella presidency can block it.

The Commission's enlargement reports due this autumn will be the first test of whether the 2027 target is credible. Ukraine has made remarkable progress on judicial reform and anti-corruption legislation under wartime conditions, but the remaining chapters, particularly on competition, agriculture and fundamental rights, are voluminous. A political decision to move forward would be just that: political, not technical.

The strategic vacuum in Paris

Macron's own nuclear policy shift, announced this week, offered European partners a broader deterrence umbrella but left the critical question unanswered: who pays? France's arsenal numbers fewer than 300 warheads. Expanding it to a credible European scale would cost billions annually at a moment when Paris is struggling to bring its deficit below 3% of GDP. The National Rally's refusal to share the deterrent is not merely ideological; it reflects a calculation that the French taxpayer would bear the cost while the political benefit accrued to Berlin, Warsaw and others. A Le Pen presidency would likely freeze the current cooperation at a bilateral level with the UK, itself outside the EU, and abandon the multilateral framework now being built.

Meanwhile, the transatlantic backdrop darkens. Trump's erratic approach to NATO's Article 5, his administration's pressure on European defence spending, and the strategic pivot to the Indo-Pacific have made the US nuclear umbrella feel conditional. The French initiative is the most ambitious European attempt yet to create a credible alternative, but it depends entirely on a French president willing to treat the deterrent as a European asset. That willingness may expire in May 2027.