How to become an official candidate in the French presidential election?

"Comment devenir un candidat officiel à l'élection présidentielle française ?"
French B2 writing exercise

Learn about the French electoral process to become a presidential candidate.

Pay attention to the hints!

Some vocabulary you may want to look up before or during this exercise: "to be enough to [do]", "to run for president", "the official ballot (=voting ballot)", "to collect (signatures)", "sponsorship (of a political candidate)", "the Constitutional Council (France)", "an elected official", "a candidacy", "non-exhaustive", "to submit [something]", "deputies (France)", "senators", "to concurrently hold several offices".

Written by Qualified French Expert Aurélie Drouard HKH, Licence d'anglais LLCE
Last updated: 2023-01-20

I’ll give you some sentences to translate into French

  • I’ll show you where you make mistakes
  • I’ll keep track of what you need to practise
  • Change my choices if you want
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How the test works
You’ll practise: Le Subjonctif Présent, Mode subjonctif, Le Présent (Indicatif)

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In France, it's not enough to decide to run for president for it to happen. Indeed, in order to be able to feature on the official ballot, each candidate has to collect the famous "500 signatures". But what is that about? This presentation of candidates, more commonly called "sponsorship", is a procedure by which the candidates must be presented to the Constitutional Council by a minimum of five hundred elected officials for their candidacy to be validated. Here's a non-exhaustive list of the elected officials allowed to submit a sponsorship: mayors, deputies, senators, members of the European Parliament elected in France... Although some elected officials concurrently hold several offices, there can only be one sponsorship per elected official.

Thinking...