Twenty-four municipalities. That is the new floor for Marine Le Pen’s National Rally after last Sunday’s first round of local elections — up from 17 in 2020. The number is modest. The trajectory is not.

French voters returned to polling stations on Sunday for mayoral runoffs in more than 1,500 communes, including Paris, Marseille and Lyon. The races are nominally about who collects the bins and fixes the pavements. In practice, they are the last large-scale ballot before April 2027, when France elects a successor to Emmanuel Macron — and every party knows it.

Marseille: The Prize the RN Covets Most

The sharpest contest is in France’s second city. National Rally candidate Franck Allisio finished just one percentage point behind incumbent Socialist mayor Benoît Payan in the first round, according to France 24. Had the hard-left France Unbowed (LFI) candidate Sébastien Delogu stayed in the race, a split left-wing vote might have handed the city to the far right. Delogu withdrew.

That tactical retreat likely saved Payan’s incumbency, but it did not erase the underlying shift. “The far right is effectively becoming the new right,” Baptiste Colin, a 31-year-old theatre worker in Marseille, told Al Jazeera. “The centre-right, which used to be strong, is now collapsing, handing all its votes over to the National Rally.”

If Marseille holds for the left, Toulon — a southern city of 180,000 — may not. The RN candidate there won the first round by a wide margin, according to France 24. A victory would make Toulon the largest city under far-right control in France. In Nice, renegade conservative Eric Ciotti, now allied with Le Pen’s party, looks set to win against a centrist-backed rival, according to Channel News Asia.

Paris: Twenty-Five Years of the Left on the Line

The capital offers a different kind of drama. Paris has been governed by the left since 2001 — first under Bertrand Delanoë, then Anne Hidalgo. Socialist Emmanuel Grégoire, Hidalgo’s former deputy, led the first round. But conservative Rachida Dati, a former justice and culture minister, has closed the gap after both a centre-right and a far-right candidate dropped out to consolidate the right-wing vote, according to France 24.

Dati faces trial in September on corruption charges she denies. That has not stopped her campaign. Grégoire, meanwhile, refused an alliance with a hard-left contender who remained in the race, splitting his own side’s vote. The left’s unity problem in Paris mirrors a national fracture: the fatal beating last month of a far-right activist, blamed on fringe leftists, has made cross-left cooperation politically toxic.

Polling shows the result within the margin of error.

The 2027 Shadow

These elections will not predict who becomes president. But they reveal the terrain on which that fight will be waged.

Three patterns stand out. First, the National Rally’s advance is incremental but sticky. “Once they’re in power, they stick around,” Jean-François Poupelin, a journalist at Marsactu, told Al Jazeera. The party governs with a formula — tax cuts, public safety, reduced subsidies to community organisations — that consolidates support in its strongholds.

Second, the left is fractured in ways that benefit the right. The Socialists struck deals with LFI in Lyon and Toulouse but refused them in Marseille and Lille, according to Channel News Asia. LFI’s growing municipal presence gives Jean-Luc Mélenchon leverage in any future left-wing coalition — leverage the Socialists resent. “This party and (leader) Jean-Luc Melenchon once again gain a position of power in what the balance of power in the left could constitute,” said Anne Muxel, a political science research director at Sciences Po university.

Third, Macron’s own Renaissance party is largely irrelevant at the local level. Its best hope is a long-shot bid for Bordeaux. The strongest centrist performer is Édouard Philippe, the former prime minister and declared presidential candidate, who is expected to hold Le Havre comfortably — running not on Macron’s brand but on his own.

Turnout and What It Signals

First-round turnout stood at 57 percent — the lowest for local elections outside the pandemic-disrupted 2020 vote. In Marseille, abstention was particularly high in working-class neighbourhoods where LFI had expected strong support, according to Poupelin. Low turnout has historically favoured the National Rally, whose voters tend to be more motivated.

Rim-Sarah Alouane, a legal scholar at the University of Toulouse Capitole, cautioned against dismissing gradual far-right gains. “It’s not an atomic victory, but that’s how they progress,” she told Al Jazeera. “Step by step, and their strategy is working quite well.”

Results are expected to trickle in through the evening. The numbers will matter. But the map — which cities turned, which alliances held, which ones cracked — will matter more when France’s parties begin drawing battle lines for 2027.

Sources