A 'specimen' voting card at a training vote session at a mock polling station in Saint-Die-des-Vosges, France on Feb. 17.SEBASTIEN BOZON/AFP/Getty Images
When French voters were called to the polls in the first round of municipal elections in 2020, during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, most stayed home. Amid fears of this mysterious new illness, the second round had to be postponed for three months.
That runoff vote saw left-leaning candidates sweep the country’s largest cities, including Paris, Marseille and Lyon. Six years later, as voters return to the polls on Sunday in the first round of municipal elections in more than 30,000 French cities, towns and villages, the right is resurgent.
The municipal vote, the second round of which will be held March 22, is likely the last major electoral contest before next year’s presidential race. As such, it will be a critical test for the far-right National Rally as it seeks to cement the alliances it needs to take both the Élysée Palace and the National Assembly next year.
France’s two-round electoral system can seem frustratingly complicated to an outsider, given that strategic voting, ad-hoc alliances and deal-making often determine who does, and does not, win power. The system can appear even more confusing at the municipal level, where national parties compete with local ones, and sometimes join forces with them.
In 2020, those dynamics led to the election of a slew of left-wing mayors promising to make their cities greener and more egalitarian. Now, concerns about security are driving the campaign amid a backlash against a war on cars by soft-on-crime left-wing mayors.
In Marseille, the incumbent Mayor Benoît Payan, who leads a coalition of ecologists, communists and socialists united under the Printemps marseillais (Marseille Spring) banner, is facing defeat at the hands of the anti-immigration National Rally’s Franck Allisio.
A far-right victory would be a political earthquake in the Mediterranean port city, where about a third of the population is of North African origin. But Marseille has also been the scene of a surge in armed violence between gangs competing for control of the local drug trade. The National Rally’s promise to crack down on crime and immigration, which it blames for the rise in violence, has fuelled Mr. Allisio’s candidacy.
In Lyon, whose Green Mayor Grégory Doucet trails his centre-right rival in the polls, the municipal vote is playing out against the backdrop of the alleged beating death of a far-right activist by members of an anti-fascist group with links to the far-left France Unbowed party in February. Mr. Doucet’s leftist coalition has unravelled amid the controversy.
The most closely watched municipal race is in Paris, where the French capital’s incumbent Socialist Mayor Anne Hidalgo is not seeking re-election after two terms in office. A darling of the foreign media, which praised her efforts to reduce car traffic and build more social housing, Ms. Hidalgo is accused by her detractors of presiding over an exodus of businesses and residents, especially wealthy ones, doubling the city’s debt load and neglecting core sanitation and security concerns.
While that may sound like news to most tourists, who do not venture far from either bank of the Seine, the decline is most evident in poorer neighbourhoods that hug the Boulevard périphérique, the 35-kilometre ring road that encircles Paris, where tent cities, drug-dealing and crime run rampant and uncollected garbage is a common sight.
The leading mayoralty candidate on the right is Rachida Dati, currently the mayor of Paris’s chic 7th arrondissement, who previously served as France’s justice minister under former president Nicolas Sarkozy and as the country’s culture minister under President Emmanuel Macron. She is promising to double the number of municipal police officers. She also proposes to arm them, an idea her Socialist rival Emmanuel Grégoire steadfastly rejects.
Unfortunately for Ms. Dati, a crowded field of centre-right and far-right candidates threatens to split the vote, enabling Mr. Grégoire and his slate of city council candidates to slip up the middle, just as Ms. Hidalgo’s ticket did in 2020. Ms. Dati’s path to victory is complicated by the surprising strength of her far-right rival, Sarah Knafo, whose proposals to unwind most of Ms. Hidalgo’s signature environmental and social initiatives have drawn strong support.
Candidates need to win at least 10 per cent of the popular vote in Sunday’s first round to remain on the ballot in the March 22 runoff. Ms. Knafo, who is polling comfortably above that threshold, has proposed a second-round alliance with Ms. Dati that would see them merge their respective slates of candidates for council. But Ms. Dati has so far rejected Ms. Knafo’s overture, fearing that an alliance with the far-right candidate would alienate the moderate centre-right voters who form the core of her supporters. She is probably right.
Paris might still swing to the right. But only if Ms. Dati can swing a minor miracle.