A French court has rejected Macron’s Renaissance party’s request to stop Marine Le Pen from using the word “renaissance” in her presidential campaign slogan, ruling that it neither infringes the party’s trademark nor misleads voters.
The Paris Judicial Court dismissed the emergency request on July 30, dealing a setback to Renaissance secretary-general and former prime minister Gabriel Attal ahead of France’s 2027 presidential election, in which he is also a candidate.
The dispute centres on a campaign poster unveiled by Le Pen days earlier, showing her against a dark blue background with her arms outstretched and her eyes raised, beneath the words Pour la France, la renaissance (“For France, the renaissance”).
The image was also adopted as the banner of the account on X of the National Rally (RN), the party led by Jordan Bardella.
Attal’s centrist party argued that the slogan unlawfully appropriated its political identity and filed legal action on July 15 accusing the RN of trademark infringement and “parasitism”, a French commercial law concept referring to unfairly benefiting from another party’s reputation.
The case was brought in summary proceedings, known in French law as a référé, which allow a judge to order urgent interim measures without settling the underlying dispute.
“The diversion is not insignificant: It is clearly intended to exploit the reputation of our movement by appropriating an essential element of its identity, namely its name,” the party argued when launching the case.
The court rejected those arguments.
In its ruling, judges found that the disputed slogan was used to promote a political offer rather than a commercial product or service and therefore fell outside the scope of trademark law.
On the allegation of parasitism, the court held that the use of the common noun “la renaissance” did not create confusion with the proper name Renaissance, nor suggest any collaboration between the two political movements.
It added that the RN was not acting as an economic operator and had drawn no advantage from the name.
The judges also concluded that the slogan did not constitute an unlawful interference with the democratic process because it was not intended to deceive voters.
The court ordered Renaissance to pay €5,000 each to Le Pen and the National Rally to cover part of their legal costs, amounting to a total of €10,000.
It also rejected a counterclaim by Le Pen and the RN alleging that the lawsuit itself was abusive, ruling that Attal’s party had merely made “a legal error without any intention to cause harm”.
Following the ruling, Renaissance announced it would appeal.
It insisted that its legal action was intended solely to “protect the identity, values and name under which thousands of activists have campaigned for several years”.
The party said it was for the appeal court to clarify the rules of law “so that they are the same for everyone and protective of a fair democratic debate”.
The party also questioned whether “the name of a political party can be freely reused by a competing political movement”.
The movement at the centre of the dispute was founded by Macron as La République En Marche in 2016 and renamed Renaissance in September 2022. Macron, who cannot stand again after two consecutive terms, remains its honorary president.
Le Pen unveiled the poster after declaring her candidacy on July 7, hours after the Paris Court of Appeal cut the ineligibility sentence imposed on her over the RN’s European Parliament assistants.
The court reduced the ban to 45 months, of which 30 were suspended, leaving a 15-month term that expired on June 30 and had already been served.
She was also sentenced to three years in prison, two of them suspended and one to be served under electronic monitoring, and fined €100,000. Le Pen has appealed to the Court of Cassation.
A 2027 bid would be her fourth. She reached the second round in 2017 and 2022, losing to Macron on both occasions.
Attal declared his own candidacy on May 22 and is competing with former prime minister Édouard Philippe to represent the centre bloc.
An Ifop survey for LCI and Le Figaro conducted on July 7-8 put Le Pen on 36 per cent in the first round, ahead of Philippe on 19 per cent and Attal on 15 per cent in an alternative scenario.
The case marks one of the first legal skirmishes of what is expected to be an increasingly contentious presidential campaign, with the two rounds due on April 18 and May 2, 2027.
