French far right claims momentum for presidency after local elections

The far-right National Rally may not have won the string of big target cities it was hoping for in France’s local election on Sunday, but its leaders said they had still built up a grassroots momentum that would propel them to victory in next year’s presidential contest. The 2027 presidential election is seen as a decisive moment for the EU as the Euroskeptic and NATO-skeptic National Rally is the current favorite to win the race for the Elysée. This week’s municipal elections are being closely scrutinized to gauge whether Marine Le Pen’s anti-immigration party is still France’s predominant political force. All in all, it was a mixed night for the far right. Its biggest victory came on the Riviera, where one of its allies won Nice, France’s fifth-biggest city. The National Rally had also campaigned hard in other significant southern cities such as Marseille, Toulon and Nîmes. It performed well in all of them but was beaten into second place. The races were close in Toulon and Nîmes, and Le Pen’s party won 40 percent of the vote in Marseille — a considerable share in France’s diverse and cosmopolitan second city. Putting a positive spin on the results, the party leaders stressed that they had won numerous smaller and mid-sized cities and towns, particularly in their southern heartlands, such as Carcassonne, Agde and Menton — adding to the first-round victory in Perpignan last week. National Rally President Jordan Bardella told supporters in Paris the far right had achieved the “biggest breakthrough of its history,” and was seizing “a strong momentum” that signaled “the end of an old world running out of steam.” National Rally leader Le Pen meanwhile hailed “dozens” of regional victories and “a strategy of local implantation” that was working. Strong nationwide, weaker in big cities The National Rally’s argument is that traditional parties, particularly on the left, are strong in the big cities but that these do not fully reflect the wider national political currents, which are running toward the right. In Paris, for example, the National Rally candidate and MEP Thierry Mariani scored a dismal 1.6 percent of the vote in the first round on March 15, but nationwide Bardella is still the favorite for next year’s presidential election. A Harris Interactive poll conducted after Sunday’s municipal elections confirmed Bardella’s position as frontrunner ahead of the 2027 race. Bardella would get 35 percent of the vote in the first round of voting, the survey said, 17 points ahead of the center-right contender, former Prime Minister Édouard Philippe. Still, the municipal election results will definitely reignite concerns among National Rally strategists about whether they really can win in a second round next year, given that the tradition of uniting against the far right in runoffs — something that helped crush Le Pen’s presidential bids in 2017 and 2022 — was on full display on Sunday. In the Mediterranean port city of Toulon, Laure Lavalette, a high-profile National Rally politician and close Le Pen ally, had a promising start in the first round of voting, winning 42 percent of the vote, 13 points ahead of the incumbent conservative mayor Josée Massi. But in Sunday’s runoff, Massi pulled ahead, benefitting from the withdrawal of a conservative candidate. The National Rally had hoped that its swell of support could break that second-round Achilles heel in these municipal elections but this perennial electoral vulnerability — that it is the party everyone gangs up against — looks set to persist. No respite for Bardella’s rivals The National Rally’s rivals are certainly not dismissing the far right because of its losses in the bigger cities on Sunday. Gabriel Attal, presidential hopeful and leader of President Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance party, said Sunday’s results showed a rise of the extremes, referring to not just the far-right National Rally but also the far-left France Unbowed, which won in the northeastern city of Roubaix and in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis. “It’s a warning signal,” he said. “More and more citizens, who voted for them, want things to change, and to change more quickly.” For the conservative Les Républicains, Sunday’s elections were bittersweet. The right won the mayoral jobs in several mid-sized cities including Limoges, Tulle, Brest and Clermont-Ferrand. In France’s fourth city, Toulouse, a former conservative Jean-Luc Moudenc saw off a far-left challenger from France Unbowed, backed by a left-wing coalition. Les Républicains leader Bruno Retailleau on Sunday claimed the right was “the Number One local political force” in France. But the right was wiped out in Paris, where former Culture Minister Rachida Dati lost to the Socialist Emmanuel Grégoire. And in France’s second-largest city Lyon, the conservative candidate Jean-Michel Aulas, a former football club owner, lost by a narrow margin to the Green incumbent mayor. Retailleau sought to cast the conservatives as the force that could appeal to voters wanting to shut out the extremes, and slammed the National Rally as “demagogues.” There is “a French way, expressed by millions of fellow citizens who want neither the social chaos of [France Unbowed] or the budgetary disorder that the [National Rally’s] economic manifesto would bring about,” he said. But the Les Républicains party has several presidential hopefuls and no clear path to decide which one will represent them in the presidential race. On Sunday, conservative heavyweights were already calling for the right to agree on a candidate against Bardella. This race for a single candidate to emerge in the middle ground is also likely to accelerate because former Prime Minister Philippe, buoyed by his victory against a strong Communist challenger in Le Havre in Normandy, will now be looking to promote his candidacy. Bardella, by contrast, simply tried to present the National Rally’s onward progression toward the Élysée as inevitable. Borrowing a phrase from former President François Mitterrand’s campaign in 1981 to end the right’s dominance in France, Bardella said the National Rally was now “a tranquil force.” “Our successes are not an achievement, but a beginning,” he said. Laura Kayali contributed reporting.