PARIS: French voters went to the polls on Sunday (Mar 22) to elect mayors in Paris, Marseille and more than 1,500 other cities and towns, in a test of the far right’s strength and the resilience of mainstream parties ahead of next year’s presidential election.
Heading nearly 35,000 municipalities – from major cities to villages with only a few dozen residents – mayors are France’s most trusted elected officials.
Many won enough votes to be elected in the first round last Sunday, but tight races in France’s biggest cities are going to runoff elections.
One of the key ballots is in Marseille, the country’s second-biggest city, where the second round pits the far-right National Rally (RN) against the incumbent Socialist mayor.
A close race is also likely in Paris, where opinion polls show victory for either the conservatives or the left is within their margins of error.
Voting started at 8am and ends between 6pm and 8pm. Results will trickle in through the evening.
TEST FOR THE FAR-RIGHT
The anti-immigration, eurosceptic RN has so far struggled to make meaningful gains in municipal elections.
The first round brought mixed results for the party, which got re-elected in several cities but failed to make major wins beyond its southern and northern bastions.
“It’s true that these 2026 municipal elections do not mark a landslide for the National Rally – far from that. But … it stands to confirm its territorial integration in France,” said Anne Muxel, a political science research director at Sciences Po university.
The RN’s chances of winning the biggest prize it covets – Marseille – took a hit when hard-left candidate Sebastien Delogu of France Unbowed (LFI) withdrew from the second round out of concern that splitting the left’s vote could help the RN.
However, in the French Riviera city of Nice, an ally of Le Pen’s party, renegade conservative Eric Ciotti, looks set to win against a candidate backed by the centre.
Alain Faiola, 71, a retiree from Marseille, said he was voting RN after previously backing the mainstream right-wing party.
“I want change. Marseille has gone downhill since this mayor has been in office,” he told Reuters.
In the same polling station overlooking the city’s old port, others said they were determined to stop the far right.
“We voted for the left, logically. Their programme interested us more, and we prefer to block the far-right,” said Nezha Bourray, 26, who was voting for the first time, having recently obtained French nationality.
