Municipal elections wrapped Sunday with 57% turnout. The far-right won some towns but lost the big cities — and Paris has a new mayor.
France completed the second round of municipal elections Sunday, with roughly 35,000 communes now holding new or returning governments. The results handed the far-right Rassemblement National a complicated scorecard: local gains in smaller towns but no breakthrough in the major cities that were supposed to validate Marine Le Pen's presidential trajectory. Turnout came in around 57%, a meaningful improvement over 2020, though still below the 63% mark from 2014.
The headline that Marine Le Pen's Rassemblement National wanted: a wave of local victories that would build momentum toward the 2027 presidential race. The headline they got: mixed results at best, with gains in smaller towns but continued failure to break through in France's major cities.
Paris stayed left. Socialist candidate Emmanuel Grégoire won the mayoral race, succeeding his fellow party member Anne Hidalgo in a result that surprised almost no one who'd been following the campaign. Lyon and Marseille similarly remained under left or centre-left control. Toulouse stayed with the traditional right.
“Lyon and Marseille similarly remained under left or centre-left control.”
The RN did pick up smaller municipalities — the kind of towns where immigration anxiety and cost-of-living frustrations have been reshaping politics for years. But the big symbolic wins, the ones that would have dominated international headlines, didn't materialize.
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Key Takeaways
→France: Socialist candidate Emmanuel Gregoire won the Paris mayoral race, succeeding fellow party member Anne Hidalgo.
→Elections: Socialist candidate Emmanuel Gregoire won the Paris mayoral race, succeeding fellow party member Anne Hidalgo.
→Europe: Socialist candidate Emmanuel Gregoire won the Paris mayoral race, succeeding fellow party member Anne Hidalgo.
→French Municipal Elections: Socialist candidate Emmanuel Gregoire won the Paris mayoral race, succeeding fellow party member Anne Hidalgo.
La France Insoumise, the hard-left party led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, also had a mixed night. Strong in some working-class suburbs of major cities, invisible in others.
The voting system itself changed in important ways. Municipalities with fewer than 1,000 residents adopted the same system used by larger cities for the first time, and Paris, Lyon, and Marseille used a two-ballot process — one to elect councilors, who then choose the mayor.
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What does it mean for 2027? Political scientist Pascal Perrineau at Sciences Po Paris called the results "a warning, not a mandate" for the RN — noting that Marine Le Pen's party continues to win protest votes in economically anxious communities while struggling to project governing credibility in cities that actually run France's economy. Both the far-right and far-left will spin these results as proof of momentum. The center and traditional right will point to their holds on major cities as evidence that French voters, when it comes to governing their daily lives, still prefer moderate pragmatism — and in a presidential election, that preference usually decides the race.
#France#Elections#Europe#French Municipal Elections#Marine Le Pen#Paris Mayor#Rassemblement National#Emmanuel Grégoire
Socialist candidate Emmanuel Gregoire won the Paris mayoral race, succeeding fellow party member Anne Hidalgo.
Did the far right win the French municipal elections?
The Rassemblement National had mixed results, gaining smaller municipalities but failing to break through in major cities like Paris, Lyon, and Marseille which remained under left or centre-left control.
