PARIS — After interviewing top politicians four nights a week on primetime TV, Léa Salamé will go home to one — in a major test case of France’s tolerance for relationships between journalists and the politicians they cover.
From Monday, 45-year-old Salamé will host one of France’s most prestigious news shows, grilling the country’s leaders in the 8 p.m. slot on the public broadcaster.
This new role has brought renewed scrutiny of her relationship with Socialist and Democrat MEP Raphaël Glucksmann, a likely presidential candidate in 2027. The two have been together for a decade.
In June, Salamé was tapped to replace Anne-Sophie Lapix to turn around the fortunes of 20 Heures, which regularly trails its main competitor, private broadcaster TF1’s newscast at the same time.
With the couple at the peak of their respective careers, their partnership will be squarely in the public eye over any potential conflicts of interest. Plenty of French politicians have married members of the media, but a French president and a star anchor living under the roof of the Elysée Palace would be a first.
“Running a news program means offering an interpretation of events and society with a hierarchy of information and political interviews. I wonder how this mix will work in the interest of public service,” Aymeric Caron, a former Salamé colleague-turned-politician, said in an interview with the gossip magazine Gala.
A plan … for now
Before her appointment, Salamé and Glucksmann had built a seemingly stable firewall between their personal and professional lives.
He led the center-left Socialist Party’s list in the past two European elections while she co-hosted public radio France Inter’s morning news show, which under her stewardship gained more than a million new listeners despite an overall drop in radio audiences.
When it came time for Glucksmann to campaign, Salamé recused herself from coverage of the contest. She has said she would do the same if Glucksmann ran for president, and her new boss, France Télévisions chief executive Delphine Ernotte, has publicly backed that plan.
“When he was campaigning for the European elections, she took a back seat. The great Léa Salamé cannot be summed up solely by her partner,” Ernotte told the popular TV program “Quotidien.”
Glucksmann’s presidential ambitions are an open secret. The Europhile leader — generally perceived as one of the most centrist figures on the French left — has repeatedly refused in interviews to rule out a 2027 run.
Polling shows Glucksmann is a long-shot — while Salamé is already established at the top in her field — but the contest is still more than a year away. With President Emmanuel Macron constitutionally barred from running and his far-right rival Marine Le Pen facing legal troubles that could prevent her from mounting a fourth bid for the presidency, the field is open.
At a press conference in June, Glucksmann brushed off accusations that Salamé faced a conflict of interest in her new post and leaned into his partner’s work as an active supporter of female empowerment.
“We’re in 2025 — I wouldn’t have imagined telling her she should give up something that is important to her career. Things are transparent, very clear,” he said. “If there’s a candidacy in a national election, the question will be raised and dealt with transparently to avoid any conflict of interest.”
Salamé struck a similar tone in an interview with La Tribune du Dimanche that same month.
“My relationship is no secret, but we keep our activities very separate. From Emmanuel Macron to Marine Le Pen, Bruno Retailleau, Édouard Philippe and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, I never felt in their eyes that they saw me as ‘the wife,’” she said.
The French political class has largely stayed silent when it comes to the pair. This is, after all, a country where adultery scandals rarely cause lasting political damage. A journalist–politician partnership can seem tame by comparison.
It’s also far from the first case of its kind. Salamé’s former cohost Thomas Sotto temporarily stepped away from reporting on politics during the 2022 presidential campaign following reports he was in a relationship with Mayada Boulos, the communications chief for the prime minister at the time, Jean Castex.
In the 1990s, former Prime Minister Alain Juppé and former Economy Minister Dominique Strauss-Kahn were both married to journalists. Isabelle Juppé had covered her husband’s own political party for La Croix but left journalism during her husband’s premiership. Strauss-Kahn’s wife, the prominent journalist Anne Sinclair, paused her television show on TF1 while retaining a leadership role with the channel. She then returned to reporting but avoided French political coverage until after her separation from Strauss-Kahn.
More recently, Le Monde’s Ivanne Trippenbach changed her beat from politics when her partner Rayan Nezzar became an adviser to then-Prime Minister Gabriel Attal.
Such a move by Salamé does not appear imminent. By not formally declaring his intention to run for president, Glucksmann has effectively allowed the couple to present any conflict of interest as hypothetical, at least for now.
That, of course, is only part of the story. He will be an active force in center-left politics, whatever happens in the presidential contest.
When French lawmakers return to work next month to debate Prime Minister François Bayrou’s austere budget and prepare for key municipal elections next year, Glucksmann will be working to raise the impact of his his center-left Place Publique party, just as Salamé presents the biggest stories of the day.
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