Wanted: politician capable of appealing to the moderate right, centre and moderate left to beat hard-right populist Jordan Bardella in the run-off of France’s 2027 presidential election. The search began in earnest after last month’s municipal elections, in which the left held on to most big cities while conservatives or the far-right National Rally (RN) hoovered up smaller towns. This year will be a marathon race to select a single candidate to face Bardella, 30, or his patron, Marine Le Pen, 57, in the final round. Le Pen remains ineligible unless an appeals court in July overturns her sentence for embezzlement of EU funds.

All opinion polls give the anti-immigration, Eurosceptic RN a sizeable lead in voting intentions for the first round. Bardella, the party’s smooth-talking but inexperienced leader, is polling as high as 38%. Barring a miracle, he seems sure of a place in the run-off. That leaves only one slot for a candidate who can reconcile mainstream conservative and liberal centrist supporters of outgoing President Emmanuel Macron, and then win over sufficient socialist, green and even radical-left voters.

The next year will be a battle to decide whose name will be on the ballot paper. The left is hopelessly divided between radical France Unbowed leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon and other centre-left groups from the socialists to the greens and communists. The chances of them uniting behind a single progressive candidate are close to zero.

Mélenchon, 74, dug deeper trenches during the municipal campaign, being accused of “intolerable antisemitism” by leading figures in the Socialist party, and refusing to dissociate himself from a militant group implicated in the videoed kicking to death of a young far-right activist. He seems certain to make a fourth presidential run next year.

Polls suggest he would win enough votes to prevent any other leftwing contender reaching the second round, but not enough to reach the run-off himself unless the centre right is splintered, too. All surveys show Bardella defeating Mélenchon by a wide margin if the leftist firebrand were his opponent, since many centrist or moderate left voters would abstain.

On the centre left, there is no natural candidate, but both Raphaël Glucksmann, 46, and ex-president François Hollande, 71, are considering running. The intellectual Glucksmann, who led the socialists’ campaign for the European Parliament elections in 2024, appeals to urban professionals but not to working-class and rural voters. Hollande’s biggest handicap is his mediocre record in office from 2012-2017, which left him so unpopular that he was eclipsed by Macron, his former aide and economics minister, and decided not to seek a second term.

On the centre right, one candidate emerged with his fortunes enhanced by the municipal voting – former prime minister Edouard Philippe, 55, leader of the centre-right Horizons party, who was re-elected mayor of Le Havre. A couple of recent polls have suggested that Philippe would narrowly beat Bardella in a run-off. No one else comes close. That puts the former Gaullist, who was Macron’s first premier, in the perilous position of early frontrunner in the presidential race.

French politics, much like the Tour de France cycle classic, rarely sees the early leader endup wearing the victor’s yellow jersey by the time the race reaches its climax on the Champs-Élysées. There are hazardous mountain stages in between. Given that the French were in a sullen, anti-establishment mood even before the inflation shock from the Iran war kicked in, it’s safer to be an outsider than the man to beat at the front of the race at this stage.

So instead of building on his momentum from the local elections, Philippe has postponed plans to start national campaigning and decided to bide his time till after the summer. He is diligently performing mayoral duties while occasionally commenting on national or international affairs to remind voters he is “en réserve de la République” (on call for the republic).

That, however, leaves space for other centre-right wannabes to push themselves forward. The ambitious leader of the centrist Renaissance party, Gabriel Attal, 37, another former prime minister, is preparing a presidential bid that could split Macron’s much-diminished centrist camp, though polls suggest he lags well behind Philippe.

Bruno Retailleau, 65, who leads the rump of the once-mighty Gaullist party, now known as Les Republicains, threw his hat in the ring in February. A conservative, Roman Catholic, law and order politician who sought to crack down on irregular migration during a stint as Macron’s interior minister, Retailleau wants his party to nominate him in an internal referendum this month. But he faces opposition from his eternal rival, Laurent Wauquiez, 51, the party’s parliamentary floor leader, and from several other Gaullist presidential hopefuls.

Wauquiez has proposed staging a primary to pick a single candidate from the centre to the far right (except the RN), but at this stage, only second-rank figures such as far rightist Sarah Knafo, 32, and her anti-Islam companion and former presidential candidate Éric Zemmour, 67, have shown interest. Philippe dismissed the idea as absurd. The centre right and centre left have held primaries before, but as French politics has become more fragmented and polarised, such contests no longer offer the same unifying legitimacy as in previous elections.

Meanwhile, a couple of elder statesmen are using TV punditry to tout their credentials as potential “hommes providentiels”. Dominique de Villepin, 72, still cuts a swashbuckling figure as the former foreign minister who dared to say “non” to the US invasion of Iraq at the United Nations in 2003. Since leaving office as prime minister in 2007, he has made money as a consultant to a Chinese private investment group, but returned to the domestic scene last year, creating a micro-party called Humanist France to back his presidential ambitions.

Thierry Breton, 71, ticks several boxes as a providential outsider. He drove Europe’s tech regulation and defence effort as an energetic EU commissioner before being forced out by commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, who is disliked in France. He clashed with Elon Musk on tech regulation and was banned by the Trump administration from entering the US. In an earlier life, he was a chief executive of technology and telecoms companies, and finance minister under President Jacques Chirac. But he lacks a political machine of his own.

Picking a single champion to keep the RN out of the Élysée Palace is a conundrum French politicians seem incapable of resolving. The more of them that choose to contest the first round rather than unite behind the best-placed candidate, the more likely it is that Bardella will be the next president.

• Paul Taylor is a senior visiting fellow at the European Policy Centre