Nearly all parties celebrated the results of France’s municipal elections, held on March 15 and 22. Above all, the contests confirmed just how muddled the country’s political situation is ahead of the 2027 presidential elections.
The conservative party Les Républicains (LR) will govern the most city halls, while the Parti Socialiste (PS) celebrated retaining Paris and Marseille, among other big cities. Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella’s Rassemblement National (RN) boasted its best-ever local-election scores, while left-wing France Insoumise (LFI) cheered its own arrival in city halls across France.
Even clear losers celebrated. The Écologistes, suffering a decline after their growth spurt in 2020, found reasons for comfort as they held on to the Lyon mayoralty; Emmanuel Macron’s camp, reduced to an even smaller minority, could at least say it won Le Havre and Bordeaux. None of them are really out of the running.
Still, these elections do confirm some wider trends. First, the collapse of Macronism and the growth of RN and LFI — two parties that could face each other in the second round of the presidential elections for the first time in history. The resilience of traditional parties (especially the PS and LR) is neither surprising nor necessarily significant for predicting the presidential elections, given that these dominant postwar forces have traditionally been strongest at the local level. Yet the municipal elections also reveal an uncomfortable lesson for the leaders of both the PS and LFI. It will be very difficult for either party to win the presidential election without collaboration between them and with other left-wing parties. This scenario, however, seems increasingly distant.
Recent months in French political life were colored by a media-political offensive aimed at solving this dilemma by destroying the reputation of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s France Insoumise and sinking its local-election prospects. It was an offensive with two main…
Auteur: Pablo Castaño
