MEP Raphaël Glucksmann issues call after becoming social democrat candidate for 2027 presidential election

The European lawmaker Raphaël Glucksmann has urged the French centre left to wage an “existential battle” to prevent Marine Le Pen’s far right winning the 2027 presidential election after he was chosen as the social democrat candidate for the presidency.

“We’ve got to rid our hearts of the spirit of defeat,” Glucksmann, the founder of the small party Place Publique, said on Monday morning after his decisive win in a centre-left primary race held by the Socialist party.

The debate around the schools protests is angry and polarised. I fear this is a foretaste of how election tensions next year will play out

• Helen Massy-Beresford is a British journalist who lives in Paris

It would be tough to argue that the demands of France’s protesting high school students are not reasonable ones, worth taking to the streets for: investment in crumbling schools, replacing absent teachers, reducing class sizes and overstuffed timetables, and bridging the inequality gap between schools in different areas.

The protests across the country on Tuesday, which demonstrators dubbed l’acte III (Act 3), or la grande mobilisation, were billed as the most dramatic day of action yet, with more school blockades and a march through central Paris in the afternoon. More than 400 schools closed preventively, including my elder daughter’s, a combined collège (for 11- to 15-year-olds) and lycée.

Helen Massy-Beresford is a British journalist and editor who lives in Paris

A generation facing unprecedented challenges deserves better than an underfunded education system

One of the most famous slogans in France’s May 1968 student protests declared “L’imagination au pouvoir” (Power to the imagination). In a postwar context of steady growth, the ’68ers dreamed of shaping an egalitarian society, freed from the social constraints of their parents’ generation. Nearly five decades on, in a very different economic climate, the goal for most of the tens of thousands of pupils disrupting schools across the country is more modest. As one placard on display had it: “I’d like to be worrying about my maths exam, not my future”.

A huge turnout of hundreds of thousands of protesters on Tuesday – a number that included many parents and teachers – confirmed the depth of resentment at years of budget cuts leading to crumbling school buildings, overcrowded classes and chronic staff shortages. Other complaints point to a lack of resources to deal with the now frequent heatwaves that make classrooms intolerable in May and June, and the unfairness of an opaque, algorithmically driven selection process for universities.

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