A bilingual election campaign website for Ensemble! (ensemble2026.uk)

Client

Ensemble! — Pour tous les Français du Royaume-Uni — a list of French citizens living in the United Kingdom, standing in the 2026 elections of the Councillors for French nationals abroad (consular elections). Its candidates come from civil society and the voluntary sector, "politically engaged or not".

Industry

Politics — election campaign

Services provided

• Bespoke campaign website design
• French–English bilingual architecture
• Custom front end connected to two Ghost® instances (headless)
• Candidate profiles in both languages
• Newsletter sign-up built into the site
• Hosting on our own infrastructure in Europe

Project objective

The list needed a campaign site that looked like no one else's, in French and in English, because the electorate it addresses lives in an English-speaking country and part of it reads more comfortably in English.

The team already knew and liked the Ghost editor. The brief was therefore twofold: keep that simple writing interface for the volunteers, and get a design that a standard Ghost theme couldn't deliver.

The challenge

• Two languages, with content that is not always translated one-to-one
• A distinctive design, closer to a political brand than to a blog
• An editor simple enough for candidates to publish on their own in the middle of a campaign
• A hard deadline: the vote opened on 22 May 2026

Solutions implemented

One editor per language, one site for the visitor

We set up two Ghost instances — one French, one English — used purely as editing back offices. In front of them sits a bespoke site, built with Astro and rendered on the server, that reads both in real time.

For the team, it means writing in French in one interface and in English in the other, without any translation plugin. For the visitor, it is one site, one address, and a FR / EN switcher on every page.

A campaign design, not a blog theme

The home page opens on a full-width photo of the team, the list name and two calls to action: the manifesto and the councillors' news. The navigation follows what a voter looks for: values, news by theme, "your councillors", proposals.

The news is organised into eight policy themes — community, rights, education, tax, social protection and consular action, consular services, entrepreneurs and jobs, cultural and sporting life — so that a reader who cares about one subject finds everything about it.

A light / dark mode switch sits next to the language selector.

Candidates in both languages

Each candidate has a profile page in French and in English, gathered under a "Our candidates" section reachable from the main menu.

Fast pages, light images

Images go through a resizing service that serves WebP at the right size for each screen, so the team can upload full-size photos without slowing the site down. The navigation itself is driven from the Ghost settings: the team can change a menu without touching code.

A newsletter from the site

Visitors can subscribe from the site itself. Sign-ups land in Ghost, and the team writes to its supporters from the same tool it publishes with.

A step-by-step approach

1️⃣ Architecture: two Ghost instances, one bilingual front end, hosting on our infrastructure.

2️⃣ Design and build of the home page, news, themes, candidate and page templates.

3️⃣ Loading the candidates in French and in English.

4️⃣ Go-live on ensemble2026.uk ahead of the campaign, then continuous additions during it: polling-station finder by postcode, how-to-vote content, interviews.

5️⃣ After the vote: the site was kept and reorganised around the councillors' news.

Results

The list had a bilingual campaign site with its own identity, run day to day by its own team. And the site did not switch off after the results: it is now the channel through which the team reports back to French residents of the UK — surgeries, press interviews, policy notes. The audience built during the campaign keeps hearing from it.

Conclusion

A campaign website is usually built to last six weeks. Separating the editing tool from the design made it possible to build something more durable: volunteers write in a familiar editor, the site looks like the list rather than like a template, and it outlives the election.

Are you preparing a campaign?

Let's talk — or read about our election campaign websites.