Socialists’ Emmanuel Grégoire on track to win Paris mayoralty | France
Early forecasts showed Socialist Emmanuel Grégoire on track to be elected mayor of Paris, beating former right-wing minister Rachida Dati by a landslide on Sunday night.
Grégoire, a Socialist MP with a long history in city hall, was running for a united left, including the Greens. He was predicted to win with about 53% of the vote. This would mark a clear victory over Dati, who served in the government under Emmanuel Macron and Nicolas Sarkozy and is trying to win the French capital for the right after 25 years of being ruled by the left.
In France’s second city, Marseille, forecasts showed mayor Benoît Payan winning with a left-wing coalition including the Socialists and the Greens, blocking the rise of Marine Le Pen’s anti-immigrant far-right party, the National Rally (RN), in the city.
Meanwhile, former prime minister Édouard Philippe is expected to launch a center-right bid for the French presidency next year after being re-elected as mayor of the northern port city of Le Havre.
Philippe was prime minister during Macron’s first term in office, including the beginning of the Covid pandemic. He has been preparing for more than a year to run for president in 2027, when Macron’s two-term presidency ends and it is unclear who will lead Europe’s second largest economy.
Philippe, the only candidate with presidential hopes in the municipal elections, won with more than 47% of the votes in the town he has governed since 2010 and is now expected to use this win to accelerate his presidential campaign. But he faces other potential candidates on the crowded centre-right, including justice minister Gérald Darmanin and former prime minister Gabriel Attal, who heads Macron’s centrist Renaissance party.
In his speech at the Le Havre town hall, Philippe said he had learned lessons from the campaign in Le Havre, among them people’s “great desire” for security and peace, social justice and “simple justice”. Philippe defeated two other candidates, one from the united left and the other from the far right. “The people of Le Havre know that there is a reason for hope when all people of good will will come together in the discourse of truth and reject the extremes and its simplistic solutions,” Philippe said.
Votes were cast in more than 1,500 cities and towns in the second round of Sunday’s local elections; this was seen as a test of political temperature ahead of the presidential election.
RN, which was among the first towns to count its votes, failed to win some of its key targets. Le Pen’s close ally, Laure Lavalette, failed to win in Toulon, a historic maritime city of 180,000 on the Mediterranean. Instead, the current traditional right-wing mayor kept the city. In the southeastern city of Nîmes, RN’s Julien Sanchez did not win. Instead, communist Vincent Bouget, leading a leftist contingent, won the city that had been ruled by the traditional right for 25 years. However, as counting continued, the RN hoped to win the southwestern town of Carcassonne and several other towns.
RN MP Laurent Jacobelli said his party had nevertheless increased its membership of local councils across France, marking a new era that was “the first step towards 2027”.
The party’s leader, Jordan Bardella, said the increase in local councilors was “historic”. He said: “The RN and its allies have never had so many elected officials in France.” This, he said, was “a dynamic that favors our ideas.”
Most importantly, a key ally of the far right won victory in Nice on the French Riviera, France’s fifth largest city. Éric Ciotti, who left the leadership of the traditional right-wing party Les Républicains and joined forces with Le Pen in 2024, won Nice from his arch-rival and onetime right-wing ally Christian Estrosi. Ciotti’s new party, the Alliance of the Right for the Republic, can now grow its membership and position itself to support a far-right presidential candidate next year.
Early results also showed the traditional right’s Les Républicains posting some victories, including winning Clermont-Ferrand, traditionally a Socialist stronghold.
The Green Mayor of Lyon, Grégory Doucet, was predicted to control the city ahead of Jean-Michel Aulas, the former president of Olympique Lyonnais football club, who is running to the right.
