Half of French voters back candidates who want out of NATO

Roughly half of French voters are currently backing presidential candidates who want to pull France out of NATO's military structures. Eight months before the election, that single statistic is concentrating minds across the alliance's Brussels headquarters. Marine Le Pen, leading the far-right National Rally, wants France out of NATO's integrated command. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, on the far left, wants out of the alliance altogether. Either outcome would remove the European Union's sole nuclear power from NATO's day-to-day military operations at precisely the moment the United States is drawing down its own presence on the continent.

The polling that alarmed Brussels

Internal NATO polling conducted this spring, seen by reporters, found that just 54 per cent of French voters would choose to remain in the alliance if asked. That is the second-lowest figure among NATO's 32 members, ahead of only Montenegro. It confirms what alliance officials have long suspected: that French public opinion is softer on NATO than any of its governments have been, and far softer than the alliance needs it to be.

France's two-round presidential system has traditionally acted as a firewall against hardline candidates. Voters coalesce around a moderate in the second round. But that assumption is looking less reliable. Both Le Pen and Mélenchon have spent years building durable electoral coalitions, and their opposition to NATO is not rhetorical decoration. Le Pen raised the subject in a closed-door meeting with a senior French military commander earlier this year, according to an official with direct knowledge of the exchange. She also argued that France would eventually need to restore relations with Russia.

A lawmaker close to the current French government described the National Rally as now dominated by its pro-Russian faction. Mélenchon, for his part, told a conference in June that remaining in NATO was incompatible with French interests because of what he called America's openly hostile posture. "There can be no question of remaining a member of NATO," he said.

What leaving would actually involve

France has done this before. In 1966, President Charles de Gaulle pulled the country out of NATO's integrated military command, expelled around 26,000 allied troops from French soil, and forced the alliance to relocate its headquarters from Paris to Brussels. Paris stayed outside the command structure for more than four decades, only rejoining in 2009 under President Nicolas Sarkozy.

The legal mechanics of a repeat would be straightforward. The French president does not need parliamentary approval to withdraw from NATO's command structures. The one-year withdrawal clause in the North Atlantic Treaty applies only to leaving the alliance's political structures, which is not what Le Pen is proposing. In practice, according to Lieutenant General Michel Yakovleff, a former vice-chief of staff at NATO's military headquarters, extracting roughly 1,000 French officers from permanent alliance posts and establishing a liaison body to maintain basic coordination would take about a year. De Gaulle followed that model: he left the command, not the alliance, and continued cooperating with NATO on operations.

Whether a future hardline president would replicate that cooperative arrangement is far from certain. The political context in 1966 was different. De Gaulle was asserting French independence within a stable Western alliance. Le Pen and Mélenchon are questioning whether France belongs in the alliance at all.

What NATO would lose

France is not a peripheral member. It is the alliance's second-most capable military power after the United States, and its contributions span areas where European capabilities are thin. A withdrawal from the integrated command would put at risk the 1,200-strong French-led battlegroup in Romania, one of the alliance's forward deployments intended to deter Russian aggression. It would complicate informal NATO-French cooperation on nuclear weapons planning. And it would remove from the alliance's order of battle Europe's only nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, the Mistral-class amphibious assault ships, the CERES satellite intelligence system, and a navy that can deploy roughly 65 per cent of its fleet at any given time, a readiness rate that exceeds the American one.

France also contributes 10 per cent of NATO's annual operational budget, which stands at roughly €5.3 billion. Yakovleff, who knows the alliance's military planning from the inside, put it plainly: France has "a little of everything," and its departure would weaken the alliance because it remains the most consequential power after the United States.

Finnish Defence Minister Antti Häkkänen made the point from a smaller country's perspective. "We hope that France understands the long-term benefits of a strong NATO," he said, adding that this required France to be "integrated quite fully" in alliance structures.

What France would lose

The costs would not be one-way. Leaving NATO's command structures would preserve France's seat on the North Atlantic Council and its vote on triggering the alliance's mutual defence clause, but it would strip Paris of influence over how military proposals are shaped before they reach political decision-makers. As Yakovleff explained, many operational proposals are pre-negotiated within NATO's military staff. France would be reduced to accepting or rejecting finished products it had no hand in drafting.

France would also lose senior command positions. These include the post of Supreme Allied Commander Transformation, based in Norfolk, Virginia, the deputy commander role at NATO's air command headquarters, and the chief of staff position at the alliance's Joint Force Command Brunssum in the Netherlands. If Paris also curtailed intelligence sharing, it would lose access to information flowing through the rest of the alliance. Yakovleff's summary was blunt: leaving would cost France a great deal politically, technically, operationally and structurally.

The strategic timing

The timing is what makes this more than a bilateral French problem. Under President Donald Trump, the United States has begun scaling back its military presence in Europe. Other NATO members are racing to build up their own forces in response to warnings that Russia could pose a direct military threat to the alliance within this decade. Jamie Shea, a former NATO spokesperson now at the Friends of Europe think tank, captured the contradiction: the whole point of the current effort is for European allies to take on more responsibility, not less. A French withdrawal would pull in the opposite direction.

One NATO diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the alliance would survive a French departure but described it as "very, very dangerous." Another used a single word: "dreadful." Marie-Agnes Strack Zimmermann, who chairs the European Parliament's defence committee, argued that only the enemies of Western freedom would benefit.

Berlin and Warsaw stand to gain

A French withdrawal would not leave a vacuum. It would accelerate an existing shift. Germany and Poland are already the continent's biggest defence spenders in GDP terms. If France steps back from NATO command and the United States continues to draw down, Berlin and Warsaw would inevitably become the alliance's European anchors. Shea described this as an acceleration of what is already happening, not a new development.

For Paris, that outcome would represent a strategic downgrade. France has long seen itself as the natural lead on European defence policy. Removing itself from NATO's command structures would hand that role to Germany by default, and not because Berlin seeks it. As one diplomat put it: if France goes out, it loses everything.

Can the damage be prevented?

There are precedents for hardline candidates moderating their positions once in office. Italy's Giorgia Meloni softened her stance on NATO after winning the premiership in 2022. Fabrice Pothier, a former head of policy planning at NATO who now runs the Rasmussen Global consultancy, cautioned against assuming continuity under a hardline French president but acknowledged that full withdrawal remains unlikely. The French have never been the most enthusiastic NATO members, he said, which makes the alliance an easy target for populists.

Shea has argued that NATO officials should begin quiet outreach to lawmakers from both the National Rally and France Unbowed, making the case that withdrawal would hurt French interests more than alliance interests. He has also suggested offering Paris additional command posts to reinforce the message that France's role matters. Whether such overtures would find a receptive audience among politicians who have built their brands on opposing American influence is another question.