French left secures big cities in high-stakes municipal elections

PARIS (CN) — On Sunday night, French Socialists managed to win power in the country’s biggest cities — Paris, Marseille, Lyon and Lille — after a tight municipal race that was seen as a way to check the country’s political pulse ahead of the 2027 presidential elections.

“Tonight Parisians have sent a message to [extreme-right leaders] Jordan Bardella, Marine Le Pen and to those who worked behind the scenes for a union of right-wing parties,” Emmanuel Grégoire, the new Socialist mayor of Paris, said after the results came in. “The message is clear — Paris is not and will never be a far-right city.”

French municipal elections are held in a two-round voting system, where candidates who achieve more than 10% in the first round can advance to the second.

During the initial round on March 15, Grégoire led with 37.98% of the vote against right-wing contender Rachida Dati’s 25.46%. Dati, the former minister of culture, is a divisive figure in French political life; many see her as detached from the general public, and she is set to go on trial for corruption in September.

“Dati is too pretentious and sure of herself,” Karima, a Paris clothing vendor who asked to go by her first name, said Monday morning. “In Paris, we don’t need someone like that — we need someone who’s at the same level as the people.”

Inside Dati’s campaign headquarters nearby — featuring ground-floor windows lining the sidewalk — open wine bottles and half-filled glasses were crowded onto a table, presumably left over from the election night on Sunday. A handful of people sat inside the unlit room, and men dressed in suits stepped outside to smoke cigarettes.

After a far-right candidate dropped out of the Paris mayoral race and her radical left counterpart stayed in, the odds seemed to be stacked against Grégoire. But ultimately, he pulled ahead with just over 50% of the vote, while Dati took 41.52%.

Dati’s campaign focused on moving migrant encampments out of the city, and some said she put a larger emphasis on establishing a “clean” Paris than finding solutions for those in need.

“[Her loss] gives hope to migrants also,” Julian Barreto, a Colombian immigrant working in an empanadas shop, said Monday afternoon. He was not eligible to vote in the municipal elections, which is reserved for French citizens and EU nationals living in France. “My vision of the world is a world where there’s community, to be able to receive people without thinking about borders, nationalities, ethnicities.”

Marseille was another city being watched closely; after the first round of voting, incumbent Socialist Mayor Benoît Payan led with 36.70% of the vote, just slightly ahead of the extreme-right National Rally’s Franck Allisio, who took 35.02%. Ultimately, he won with roughly 54% of the vote, and Allisio took 40.30%.

“This is no small victory,” Payan said after the results came in on Sunday night. “Marseille, the city that some thought was lost, has shown its most beautiful face tonight.”

In recent years, the once-taboo National Rally has been surging in popularity, reflecting the success of a normalization campaign spearheaded by its leader Marine Le Pen. Marseille was seen as a place for the party to put its success to the test in a major city. But despite the loss, the National Rally made gains in smaller towns across the country and won in Nice, a major city on the Mediterranean.

“By the dozens, the National Rally is winning municipalities tonight at the end of the second round of municipal elections,” Le Pen posted on X on Sunday night. “This is a tremendous victory and confirmation of the National Rally’s strategy of local implantation.”

Gilbert Casasus, a prominent political scientist, said voting turnout for National Rally will likely be higher during next year’s presidential elections.

“Do not underestimate the potential, the pool of votes for the National Rally … because this time, all of France is going to vote,” he said. “Therefore, they certainly have a significant reserve of votes, particularly in those cities where there is a high level of dissatisfaction.”

He added the municipal elections have also revealed a fractured left; the extreme-left France Unbowed was largely cast out of alliances with the more moderate Socialists, and there isn’t currently a left-wing candidate who has harnessed similar momentum to Le Pen and Bardella.

“The left is forced today — and at first glance, it doesn’t have one — to find a man or a woman capable of embodying it,” Casasus said. “And while Bardella is the favorite today, there is no guarantee he will win, but it will be a matter of seeing how French political life reshapes itself, and perhaps that is one of the takeaways … It shows the extent to which French political life is fractured, totally fractured, especially on the left.”

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