Bruno Retailleau, the candidate of France’s conservative Les Républicains, is due in Tel Aviv on Tuesday evening to set out his programme for the 2027 presidential election before French expatriates, as the race to succeed Emmanuel Macron moves onto the ground where overseas voters can be reached.
Bruno Retailleau © X
Bruno Retailleau, the candidate of France’s conservative Les Républicains, is due in Tel Aviv on Tuesday evening to set out his programme for the 2027 presidential election before French expatriates, as the race to succeed Emmanuel Macron moves onto the ground where overseas voters can be reached.
The first round is set for 18 April 2027. Candidates are already holding rallies, filling television studios and travelling abroad. Israel is one of the larger stops on that map: one of the biggest French communities outside Europe, and one that has grown again since the 7 October 2023 Hamas attacks.
Bruno Retailleau served as interior minister, then minister of state for the interior, from September 2024 to October 2025 in the Barnier, Bayrou and Lecornu governments, on a hard line on immigration, crime and Islamism.
In May 2025 party members elected him president of Les Républicains. He declared for the Élysée on 12 February 2026 and was designated the party’s candidate on 19 April 2026, with 73.8 percent of the membership vote, after members chose a direct nomination over a primary.
His pitch is a “reasonable radicalism” on the conservative right: authority, national pride, and what he calls a last chance to “put France back the right way up.” In June he opened his campaign before several thousand supporters at the Parc Floral in Paris and told them: “I swear to you that we will win in 2027.”
Retailleau has made order and immigration the centre of the platform he is taking on the road.
The visit also sits on the third anniversary of 7 October. Israeli outlets reported that Retailleau would be in Israel on 6 and 7 October for the commemorations and was expected to meet President Isaac Herzog on Wednesday.
As interior minister he described Israel as “in its right” to defend itself and called Iran an existential threat. He has said he supports a two-state outcome in principle, in a Gaullist line, but opposed France’s recognition of a Palestinian state in September 2025, arguing the conditions were not met.
The French electorate on the ground
Registration at a French consulate is not compulsory, so official rolls undercount the community. France’s foreign ministry still cites an older baseline of 53,317 French nationals on the consular registers in Israel in 2020, and an estimate of about 100,000 once non-registered residents are included.
More recent figures point higher on the rolls. Expatriation guides drawing on consular data put about 75,000 French nationals on the registers in Israel at the end of 2025, plus 22,365 in the Jerusalem consular district, which also covers the Palestinian territories.
For the May 2026 election of councillors for French citizens abroad, 78,998 voters were on the electoral list for the Tel Aviv and Haifa constituency. The main poles are Tel Aviv and its region, Netanya - often called “Little France” - Ashdod, Ra’anana and Jerusalem.
For a candidate whose domestic message is security and the fight against antisemitism, that electorate is an obvious audience.
Tuesday night’s Tel Aviv meeting is the campaign stop. Wednesday’s commemorations are the political frame.
Qatar, Jordan and Kuwait on Sunday condemned Israel's completion of work on the so-called "Sufa 53 Line" in Syria's Quneitra province. The three states said the project violates Syrian sovereignty, international law and the 1974 Disengagement Agreement.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Monday at a ceremony marking the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, that the group would never again hold "any power" in the Gaza Strip, where the question of future governance remains unresolved.
One was inspired by her son's last stand trying to fight off attackers rampaging through a kibbutz. Another by her son's final words as militants tossed grenades into a bomb shelter packed with fleeing revellers from a music festival. A third by the brothers he campaigned to bring home from captivity in Gaza.
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