One year before Emmanuel Macron’s term ends, parties will be able to gauge their strength in the second round of the local elections, with tight races in major cities, such as Paris, Marseille and Lyon.
French voters returned to the polls this Sunday to elect mayors in Paris, Marseille and more than 1,500 other municipalities, in a vote widely seen as a test for political parties ahead of next year’s presidential election.
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France counts nearly 35,000 municipalities, ranging from major urban centres to small villages with only a handful of residents.
At the local level, mayors remain the most trusted elected officials in the country.
Polling stations opened at 8 a.m. local time and are due to close between 6 p.m. and 8 p.m., depending on the location. Results are expected to be released gradually throughout the evening.
The vote comes a week after a first round marked by high abstention, with around four in ten registered voters staying away from the polls — the highest level outside the exceptional circumstances of the 2020 election, which was disrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic.
In the first round, the Socialist Party and the right (the conservative Republicans (LR), Horizons, and the Democratic Movement) clearly came out on top.
Yet it was the significant gains recorded by the far-right National Rally (RN) and hard-left France Unbowed (LFI) that really struck observers.
President Emmanuel Macron's Renaissance party, however, were trailing behind in the first round of voting last Sunday.
Divisions on the left
France Unbowed is playing a major role in this year's municipal elections for the first time.
The hard-left party has already taken the city of Saint-Denis (north of Paris) from the Socialist Party in the first round.
France Unbowed also hopes to win about ten other major cities, including Roubaix in northern France, this Sunday.
The moderate left Socialist Party leadership had distanced itself from France Unbowed after accusations of antisemitism targeting the party's leader, Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
But on the evening of the first round, the Socialist Party’s national secretary, Olivier Faure, could only stand by and watch as candidates from his party and those from France Unbowed struck alliances in several cities.
In the aftermath of the second round, the Socialists will be able to assess the extent of their dependence on the hard-left party they were trying to isolate.
For the National Rally, the challenge is to prove it can govern
On the far right, the National Rally already controls the south-western city of Perpignan, where Louis Aliot was re-elected in the first round.
The National Rally aims to retain several of the towns it won in the 2020 elections and hopes for a higher score than in previous local polls.
Marine Le Pen’s party is targeting several major cities, including southern Marseille, France’s second-largest city, where Franck Allisio is up against the outgoing Socialist mayor, Benoît Payan.
The right wants to show it can hold its ground
For its part, the conservative right now controls only a handful of large cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants and hopes to demonstrate its ability to resist the far-right wave.
The conservative Republicans are, above all, banking on Paris, where Rachida Dati is closely trailing Socialist Emmanuel Grégoire.
The race could also be tight in Lyon, where Jean-Michel Aulas wants to unseat the outgoing Green mayor, Grégory Doucet.
For the Greens, Lyon is one of the cities the party won back in 2020 and hopes to keep under its control.
In the Macron camp, expectations are modest
The Renaissance party would like to establish itself in south-western Bordeaux, with former minister Thomas Cazenave leading the charge, hoping to unseat the Green mayor Pierre Hurmic.
Horizons, the party of former prime minister Édouard Philippe, has a stronger local base and should have no difficulty keeping its strongholds in Le Havre, Angers and Reims.
PCF leader re-elected in the first round
As for the French Communist Party (PCF), its national secretary, Fabien Roussel, was re-elected in the first round in northern Saint-Armand-les-Eaux, and the party is hoping for a good result in the southern city of Nîmes.