French Prime Minister's Push for a Bank Consortium to Fund Presidential Candidates Fails: Major Banks Say No and Want a State Solution
Paris — French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu remains locked in a fruitless dialogue with the country's banks over campaign financing for the 2027 presidential election. According to Le Monde on November 5, Lecornu wrote to banking institutions on October 6 urging them to set up a joint funding mechanism for presidential candidates' campaigns; the banks responded with separate letters, each rejecting the proposal.
Lecornu did not stop there. On October 30 he sent the banks another letter urging them to resume discussions and find a solution that would give every candidate the necessary means to present their platform to the French people, emphasizing that no foreign power should be able to exert influence, or create dependence, through financial means in the major republican event of a presidential election.
At the root of the dispute is the long-running difficulty of National Rally candidate Marine Le Pen in securing loans. Le Pen borrowed from a Russian bank in 2014 to fund several campaigns; since the 2017 Law on Confidence in Political Life, loans from outside the European Economic Area are prohibited. For the 2022 presidential election she turned to a Hungarian bank, and she could repeat that scenario in 2027 — something the government is determined to avoid at all costs. The National Rally candidate is virtually certain to win at least 5 percent of the first-round vote and thus qualify for state reimbursement of campaign expenses.
For the banks, the real risk is less financial than reputational. Over the summer, thousands of customers wrote to their banks after reports that the prime minister's office was discussing a consortium of the six major French banks — BNP Paribas, Société Générale, BPCE, Crédit Mutuel, Crédit Agricole and La Banque Postale — to lend to Le Pen. The banks have since closed ranks and now favor a solution involving a bank directly or indirectly owned by the state, such as La Banque Postale, Bpifrance or the Caisse des Dépôts; Olivier Gavalda, the incoming head of the French Banking Federation, said publicly in July that banks need state guarantees for campaign loans.
The government, however, has refused to provide a state guarantee, which would be legally fragile and would create inequality between candidates, some of whom have already taken out bank loans. Lecornu has instead called for an alternative and secure mechanism without a public guarantee. The issue reaches well beyond the National Rally: several candidates are struggling to access credit, and with less than a year and a half before the 2027 election, the standoff between the prime minister's office and the banking sector remains unresolved.
(Source: Le Monde)
Source: Le Monde
Published by GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 图：法国总理塞巴斯蒂安·勒科尔尼官方肖像。CC BY-SA 4.0，经 Wikimedia Commons。 / Photo: Official portrait of French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu. CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
