France went to the polls yesterday for nationwide municipal elections, choosing local councils in cities, towns and villages (all referred to as communes). Most of the larger places, which is where nearly all the political interest is, will go to a second round next Sunday, since with the party system now thoroughly fractured it’s very hard for any ticket to win more than 50% of the vote.
Unlike a standard two-round election (such as for the French presidency), however, there is no automatic exclusion of all but the top two tickets. Any ticket winning more than 10% of the first-round vote can stay in for the second round. But they don’t have to; they can withdraw, endorse one of the other tickets, and reach an agreement to incorporate some of their candidates on its list. Tickets with less than 10% but more than 5% are excluded but can also merge their candidates with another list. (Here’s my explanation of the system from the 2014 election.)
So, for example, consider Nice, an especially hotly-contested race. The far right is in the lead with 43.4%, ahead of the incumbent centre-right ticket with 30.9%. The centre-left has 11.9%, the far left 8.9%, and three minor tickets soaked up the remaining 4.8%. (Official results are here; for a key to the abbreviations click on “Rappel nuances” at the bottom of the page.) If the centre-left stays in, as it’s entitled to, the far right will almost certainly win; more likely it will withdraw and endorse the centre-right, giving them a chance of overtaking the far right.
Given the gains it’s made in recent years, especially the European election of 2024, the far right went into these elections with high hopes. We’ll have to wait until the second round to see how well they’ve been met, but so far it appears that its advances have been relatively modest. Similarly on the left: going by the local elections, you’d have to say that reports of the death of the centre-left have been greatly exaggerated.
This has been something of a pattern over the last decade or so. The rise of the far right and the advent of Emmanuel Macron in the centre have transformed the French party system at a national level, as seen in presidential, parliamentary and European elections. But the change is much less noticeable at regional and local level, where centre-left and centre-right have maintained, if not quite their old ascendancy, at least a front-rank position.
To try to quantify this, I continued an exercise that I started last time around. I added together the votes for the various tickets in the 16 largest communes (leaving out Paris, Lyon and Marseille*), and I got this result:
| 2014 | 2020 | 2026 | |
| Far left | 7.1% | 3.1% | 15.6% |
| Centre-left | 31.0% | 34.2% | 28.2% |
| Green | 4.5% | 11.8% | 3.8% |
| Centre | 1.5% | 11.1% | 12.6% |
| Centre-right | 39.4% | 29.3% | 23.0% |
| Far right | 13.0% | 7.0% | 15.0% |
| Others | 3.6% | 3.5% | 1.8% |
The drop in the Green vote probably isn’t very meaningful because the Greens are usually on a joint ticket with the centre-left, but clearly there’s been some shift from centre-left to far left. It’s nowhere near what you’d think, though, from looking at presidential results: in the 2022 presidential election the far-left candidate, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, won 22.0% of the vote as against 8.7% for the combined Socialists, Greens and Communists. At local level those proportions are reversed, and more.
On the right, although the centre-right has lost ground, it is still comfortably outperforming its far-right rival, National Rally. The latter has held the one major city it won last time, Perpignan (winning on the first round with 50.6%), and has a good chance in Nice, Toulon and possibly Nîmes. But centre-right tickets are ahead in Toulouse, Reims, Le Havre, Angers, Clermont-Ferrand, Brest and Limoges, among others.
As usual, the centre-left does best in the big cities; Socialist-led tickets have clear leads in Paris, Nantes, Strasbourg, Montpellier, Lille and Rennes, while the Greens are narrowly ahead in Lyon and Bordeaux. A united left ticket has a small lead over the far right in Marseille – that will be closely watched in the second round. The only major cities I can find with the centrists in the lead are Annecy and Amiens, although in some places they combine with centre-left or centre-right. (Le Monde has a nice colorful map showing all the first-round leaders.)
The picture may become clearer next week, but so far the results confirm the impression that next year’s presidential election is wide open. With far-right leader Marine Le Pen still in doubt about her eligibility and Mélenchon damaged by the controversy over the murder of a far-right activist, there may even be an opportunity for centre-right and centre-left to reclaim some of their lost relevance.
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* Technical note: those three were left out because they voted on a ward system, making it difficult to aggregate their vote. The system has now changed, meaning they could be added in, but then the direct comparison with 2020 would be lost. For what it’s worth, adding them doesn’t change the numbers much; centre-right, far left and others all come down a bit, with the gain shared among the rest.
The World is Not Enough 