PARIS — Former French Prime Minister François Fillon has been suspended for 10 years from the Légion d’honneur, France’s highest order of merit, after being found guilty of providing his wife with a fake job in which she was paid a salary using taxpayer money.

The decision to suspend Fillon was published Thursday morning in the French official gazette. It was approved by President Emmanuel Macron after being recommended by the body tasked with handling disciplinary measures for the Légion d’honneur.

The fake jobs scandal emerged during the campaign for the 2017 presidential election and cost Fillon a shot at the presidency, as he was a front-runner in the contest before the allegations emerged.

Fillon was found guilty in 2020 but appealed the decision. He and his wife Penelope, however, could not provide evidence that she had actually worked for her husband over the course of several contracts under which she was hired to be his parliamentary assistant during his time as an MP.

The appeals court last year upheld the verdict, handing him a four-year suspended prison sentence and a €375,000 fine. The 72-year-old did not appeal that decision to a higher court.

Former President Nicolas Sarkozy, under whom Fillon served, was also stripped of his Légion d’honneur last year after being found guilty of corruption and exhausting all his appeals.

Sarkozy is fighting his conviction in another case for receiving money from Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi to fund his first presidential run in 2007. A first court found him guilty and sentenced him to five years in prison, but he has appealed the verdict and continues to profess his innocence.

PARIS — After a summer of extreme, climate change-driven heat, France must spend billions of euros to help the country rebuild and ensure it is better prepared the next time the mercury rises and records fall.

Money, however, is hard to come by.

France is sitting on more than €3.5 trillion in public debt, which is becoming increasingly expensive to finance and is well above the European Union’s limit. Paris has already committed to billions in increased defense spending over the next several years, ruled out significant tax hikes and promised to slash its budget deficit, which came in at 5.1 percent of gross domestic product last year, to 3 percent by 2029 to comply with EU rules.

Crafting a budget for next year that can achieve those goals while also allocating enough resources to prepare France for the next summer of extreme heat that cooks livestock alive, plunges the country into drought and fuels wildfires that drive thousands from their homes is like trying to square the circle. But getting a hung parliament to agree on spending in the run-up to a presidential election will make the exercise even more difficult.

“We need billions — let’s be clear-eyed about this,” said Sophie Panonacle, a centrist, pro-government lawmaker who represents the fire-hit southwestern Bassin d’Arcachon area. “We really must urgently consider this issue of adaptation. We are making no progress at all on this matter.”

Budget crunch, meet climate crisis

Visiting the southwestern town of La Porge on Monday, where hundreds of people saw their homes go up in flames last month, Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu listed a series of measures crafted to help residents rebuild their homes and keep businesses hit hardest by the fires afloat.

These included a total of €12 million in direct assistance for the two local administrations most affected by the fire, Gironde and the Landes, as well as rebates on property taxes and social security contributions in those areas and more funding to replant forests. Later that evening, President Emmanuel Macron announced that the proposals would also apply to the southern region of Var.

Lecornu said the measures would add up to €100 million, though it’s unclear whether that figure covers costs only in the towns he visited or also in the Var region.

Ecological Transition Minister Monique Barbut said last week that the total immediate cost of the summer’s heat, including lost homes and incomes, could reach €10 to €15 billion — the equivalent of 0.5 percent of GDP — though she cautioned that those figures were a rough estimate. When asked by French daily Libération about Barbut’s estimate, Economy Minister Roland Lescure later said it was too early to quantify the damage.

Whatever the final total comes to, there’s little doubt it will be difficult to pay given the need to get the country’s finances in order.

In a report commissioned by the French finance ministry, top economists last month said France must cut spending and raise taxes by €125 billion by 2032 to prevent its budget deficit from reaching 7 percent of GDP by the end of the decade.

A comprehensive strategy

Critics of the government say it has failed to provide specific details on how it intends to fund immediate and future budget needs for adaptation and climate change mitigation, frustrating lawmakers.

“We need to respond to climate-related events, but first we need a comprehensive strategic review regarding resources already allocated and promises made around fighting wildfires,” said Jean-François Husson, the Senate’s budget watchdog. “We’re addicted to making announcements which aren’t followed by results, and meanwhile the debt levels are spiraling.”

Husson said that he intends to summon government officials to provide clearer figures in the coming days.

“They cannot treat Parliament the way they do, specifically regarding budgetary matters,” Husson said.

That criticism cuts across party lines. Eric Coquerel, the left-wing head of the finance committee in the French National Assembly, has asked the government to urgently present a revised version of this year’s budget to parliament to address the need for more funds.

With state coffers so depleted, Barbut floated in an interview with Libération tapping private savings to help cover costs, as the French rank fairly high among EU countries in terms of savings but, like the rest of Europe, don’t invest much in stocks and bonds.

Panonacle, the centrist lawmaker, is one of 50 MPs pushing a proposal to use €50 billion in private savings to fund costly adaptation policies, including making buildings more resilient to extreme heat, installing more air conditioning in public facilities, and reinforcing flood defenses.

However, that money is already used to finance public projects, particularly social housing, and the economy ministry last year shot down a similar proposal to use money from a popular savings account to bolster defense spending.

Some ministries are focusing on efficiency gains. Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez will present a bill in September meant to modernize France’s civil security providers for example by rethinking its emergency dispatch system so firefighters are no longer deployed for every minor emergency.

“It’s not just about the amounts allocated, but also about how you use resources,” said an interior ministry official, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly.

Once summer ends, the clock starts ticking. Lecornu’s government is expected to present lawmakers with a draft budget to be debated by October. The goal is to get the process done by the end of the year — a goal lawmakers failed to meet in 2024 and 2025.

PARIS — Center-left MEP Raphaël Glucksmann will announce that he’s running in next year’s presidential election in France in the next few days, most likely with a prime-time TV interview on Sunday, according to three people close to him.

The trio, granted anonymity to speak candidly about Glucksmann’s plans, said he plans to take part in a closed primary being organized by the Socialist Party that currently includes Ségolène Royal, the Socialist presidential candidate in 2007 who lost to Nicolas Sarkozy, and MP Philippe Brun. Socialist Party leader Olivier Faure has also said he is considering running.

While a win would guarantee Glucksmann the support of the Socialists, the main center-left force in France, the party has been struggling to make inroads with voters and is beset by infighting.

Several high-profile Socialists, including former President François Hollande and former Prime Minister Bernard Cazeneuve, have publicly hinted at plans to sit out their party’s primary and launch independent presidential bids.

However, polls show that Glucksmann, the leader of his own small political party, Place Publique, is the best-placed presidential hopeful on the center left after leading the Socialists and their allies to a strong third-place finish in the 2024 European elections.

Yet he and the rest of the field still lag significantly behind far-right front-runner Marine Le Pen, according to most surveys. France’s presidential election goes to a runoff if no candidate scores more than 50 percent of the vote, and if the polls hold, Le Pen is all but guaranteed to nab one of the final two spots.

To advance to the second round, Glucksmann will have to see off centrist and center-right rivals like Edouard Philippe and the firebrand anticapitalist Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

Mélenchon, who announced his plans to run in May, is currently polling slightly ahead of Glucksmann, but both are within striking distance of making the runoff.

The two are bitter rivals whose divisions are reminiscent of those across left-leaning parties in the Western world, including the U.S. Democratic Party.

Glucksmann hopes his centrist brand of politics can win over former Socialist voters who backed President Emmanuel Macron. Mélenchon’s hardline messaging is more targeted at low-propensity voters, including younger voters and those from working-class, multicultural communities in major French cities.

Glucksmann and Mélenchon disagree on issues ranging from France’s participation in NATO, — which Mélenchon opposes and Glucksmann supports — to pension reform.

Mélenchon has pledged to lower the minimum retirement age to 60 if elected president, while Glucksmann believes some workers should be required to work longer and that France should move toward a system where retirement age would be based on life expectancy and individual working conditions.

PARIS — French firefighting unions are calling for a nationwide protest next month after accusing the government of failing to adequately support them during a summer of unprecedented heat.

“We are asking for the necessary resources to protect French citizens,” said Xavier Boy, a spokesperson representing several firefighters’ unions.

The strike will take place Sept. 29. Firefighters are allowed to walk out on the job but must maintain minimum staffing levels to respond to emergencies.

Boy said the unions’ most pressing demands include legislation to “modernize” France’s civil security framework, “massive” recruitment of professional firefighters and increased funding to protect firefighters’ health and safety.

He also called for “investments to match the risks France faces today and will face tomorrow” given Europe is the planet’s fastest-warming continent.

Boy and other firefighting representatives on Thursday — when they held a smaller-scale strike — met with French Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez to discuss their concerns. They said they left unsatisfied and disappointed, accusing the minister of equivocating and spewing “political blah blah.”

Nuñez told reporters later Thursday that a bill to improve civil security would be presented to the unions on Sept. 8. The minister said the resources granted to firefighters would “evolve” in next year’s budget, but he refused to commit to a specific increase.

Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu has also tasked seven parliamentarians with producing a report on how to improve firefighting in France and asked them to submit policy proposals by Sept. 21.

France’s current firefighting system relies heavily on volunteers. As of 2024, just under 80 percent of the country’s firefighters were volunteers, while fewer than 20 percent, mostly in urban areas, were professionals.

Most full-time firefighters work in major urban areas like Paris, but this summer they have faced ferocious conflagrations fueled by climate change-driven heat and drought, which are expected to cost taxpayers billions of euros.

Boy said firefighters battling the wildfire near Bordeaux, one of the worst in recent French history, were insufficiently equipped.

“Everything lacked — personnel, equipment and forest firefighting resources … especially anticipation,” he said.

PARIS — France’s historically hot summer will end up costing the country €10 billion to €15 billion — the equivalent of as much as 0.5 percent of French gross domestic product — according to an estimate shared by Minister for Ecological Transition Monique Barbut.

Barbut said the preliminary estimate, which she advised treating “with great caution,” was based on an extrapolation of heat-related costs compiled by France’s official statistics agency, Insee, in past years. She added that the figure could rise as temperatures remain well above seasonal averages in many French regions. Eighty-five percent of the country was also under drought warnings as of mid-July.

Barbut said recent wildfires and drops in agricultural output were the biggest estimated costs and warned they would continue to grow in the future if governments fail to implement policies to limit the impacts of climate change.

France’s August 2003 heatwave, which, until this summer, was the warmest ever recorded in the country, led to a 22 percent drop in cereal production and a 9 percent drop in wine production, according to the French statistics agency.

A 2025 report from the European Central Bank found that regions hit by heat waves and droughts both had noticeable impacts on European economic output.

Nicolas Camut contributed to this report.

PARIS — Former Prime Minister Gabriel Attal is trying to jump-start his presidential prospects by taking advantage of his rivals enjoying France’s cherished August break.

Attal, a former prime minister who now leads President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist political party Renaissance, is betting that by keeping a busy schedule during the holiday and meeting with people across the country — including those at vineyards, markets and ports as well as vacationers in picturesque seaside towns — he can show voters what sets him apart from the field.

“It’s a rather bourgeois assumption to think that all French people take time off or go on vacation,” said a representative for Attal’s team who, like others in this story, was granted anonymity to speak candidly about campaign dynamics. “There’s no way he’s going to suspend his campaign over the summer.”

But political reality is also forcing Attal to campaign in August for the vote in April of next year. If he wants a real shot at catching up in the polls, there’s little time to waste.

Surveys have consistently shown the 37-year-old trailing Edouard Philippe, his main ideological rival for centrist and center-right votes. Given the contest goes to a two-candidate runoff if nobody wins a majority in the first round, the two men have tentatively agreed that only one of them should be on the ballot so they don’t split their shared voter base — which could cost both of them a spot in the second round.

Philippe, far-right front-runner Marine Le Pen, far-left firebrand Jean-Luc Mélenchon and conservative candidate Bruno Retailleau are all among the presidential hopefuls taking long summer breaks, only interrupting their time off for the occasional op-ed or statement on major events like the wildfires that ravaged southwest France.

Their reasoning for slowing down during the peak holiday season is straightforward: Voters want to rest and recharge, so candidates shouldn’t harass them with politics and should instead enjoy one last bit of respite before the race enters its decisive stretch.

“We shouldn’t bother the French people while they’re on vacation,” said a Retailleau adviser.

Attal is betting otherwise that a summer spent campaigning can help close the gap in the polls.

“A campaign is about winning over the French one by one … [Attal] wants to show that he’s more determined than the others,” added his adviser.

The right track

It’s unclear for now to what extent Attal’s summer work will reap dividends with voters, as most pollsters who would investigate that question have themselves set out-of-office messages.

But the absence of other candidates on the campaign trail has given Attal an opportunity to dominate headlines, and he’s used it to make a play for right-wing voters.

At the start of the month, Attal, a member of parliament who represents a Paris suburb, gave an interview to the right-wing weekly Le Journal du Dimanche in which he called for lower immigration, a sweeping streamlining of France’s administrative procedures and more effective enforcement of criminal sentences.

He then traveled to western France, where, in front of cameras, he confronted a group of French gens du voyage — a legal classification for traditionally itinerant communities, including Roma and Manouche, and long a target of the French right — who had occupied land without authorization.

The encounter can be seen below in a report from CNEWS, in French.

French municipalities are required to provide designated stopping sites for traveling communities, but those obligations are not always met — or the sites provided are insufficient — sometimes resulting in unauthorized occupations of public or private land.

For both Attal and Philippe, making inroads on the right will be crucial. Macron’s 2022 reelection was buoyed by older, more affluent voters who had traditionally backed conservatives.

But Philippe begins that contest with a built-in advantage.

He is a former member of the conservative party Les Républicains and has always identified as a man of the right. Attal, who started his political career in the youth wing of the center-left Socialists, has resisted the label.

One conservative minister in the current French government, who has not endorsed a candidate for 2027, readily described Philippe as belonging to his political camp. Attal, the minister said, has a “very flexible” ideological spine.

Sarah Paillou and Anthony Lattier contributed to this report.

PARIS — Is France ready for a crisis that plunges it into darkness? The French government is planning to find out.

The government is looking to organize a tabletop simulation of a sudden, nationwide power outage in the second half of 2027, according to four people with direct knowledge of the exercise, who were granted anonymity to discuss plans that have not been publicly announced.

The exercise will involve the French electricity grid operators Enedis and RTE as well as several government departments and ministries and the French military administration. 

Its purpose will be to determine how the country would respond to a paralyzing electricity outage of the kind that hit Spain and Portugal in April 2025, or a major cyberattack targeting the power grid as Poland experienced last year — an act of sabotage Brussels has attributed to Russian intelligence services.

The simulation will test “the country’s ability to respond,” said one person familiar with preparations for the exercise, adding that it is intended to assess the time needed to restore power and the country’s ability to ensure the continuity of essential services.

The exercise was formally confirmed during an interministerial committee on national resilience on July 8. A detailed announcement should come before the end of the year.

The meeting notes outline other priorities, such as making sure the French state maintains access to goods considered “essential to ensuring the continuity of the state and the protection of the population.”

These include “emergency blankets, generators, medicines, telecommunications equipment, equipment for law enforcement, as well as rare and critical raw materials.”

Stress test

Crisis preparedness has turned into a political issue in France as record-breaking heat and wildfires are forcing the country to reckon with its ability to respond to emergencies. 

Last summer, the government updated the country’s National Resilience Strategy, a roadmap on how to “maintain the functions essential to collective life” in the face of war or natural disasters. 

Since the start of the summer, many French regions have faced unprecedented temperatures, with mercury levels setting multiple records in June. 

In the country’s southwest, out-of-control wildfires fueled by extreme heat and drought forced mass evacuations that affected more than 200,000 people.

In Paris, the mayor made a desperate plea to large-scale food retailers to mobilize ice stocks over fears that first responders would run out of much-needed cubes to cool down victims of heatstroke.

Opposition parties were quick to attack the government over what they described as a widespread lack of preparedness, forcing the executive to defend itself.

French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu also announced that the government would submit a bill to parliament to improve emergency response systems.

“We want to refocus fire and rescue services on their core mission and adapt our organization to the crises that lie ahead,” said Lecornu Sunday in an interview with La Tribune Dimanche.

PARIS — Former Prime Minister Gabriel Attal is the latest in a string of French presidential candidates allegedly targeted by a Russian disinformation campaign.

Attal, the candidate of President Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance party, said on Thursday he had been “a victim” of an electoral “interference” attempt originating from Russia, and that he expected such “destabilization efforts” to increase ahead of France’s April 2027 election.

Viginum, the country’s agency for fighting online disinformation, confirmed it had detected the operation against Attal and attributed it “with a high level of confidence” to “pro-Russian” disinformation tactics.

Former Prime Minister Édouard Philippe, who is also running for president, was the first to be reportedly targeted last week, before center-left parliamentarian Raphaël Glucksmann, who is expected to run, shared that he had been targeted by a “Russian operation” on Monday.

Attal said on RTL radio on Thursday the smear campaign against him consisted of falsified news reports about his health and policy proposals, which copied the branding of French news outlets. “Russia wants to steal the election from the French,” he said.

A 2024 report from Viginum identified a similar “pro-Russian campaign” known as “Matriochka,” which involved news and media reports impersonating well-known French outlets.

“Combating foreign interference and protecting our democratic framework are a priority,” current Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu posted online on Wednesday. “Several instances of foreign interference targeting candidates have already been detected, and in each case, the individuals were immediately notified.”

Even his allies don't want the French president's face on their posters or his voice on the radio.

© Ludovic Marin via AP

An alliance with Reconquest would strengthen Marine Le Pen's National Rally ahead of a snap election.

© AP

The French far right headed by Jordan Bardella is projected to grab more than the combined total of the second and third place finishers as it lands its strongest-ever showing in a nationwide vote.

© Lewis Joly/AP