Far right on track for major victory in French Riviera, poll shows

 

Far right on track for major victory in French Riviera, poll shows

 

Le Pen ally has 10-point lead over center-right incumbent in race to lead Nice.

 

Photo-Illustration by Natália Delgado

February 17, 2026 6:00 pm CET

By Victor Goury-Laffont and Alexandre Léchenet

https://www.politico.eu/article/marine-le-pen-eric-ciotti-far-right-major-victory-french-riviera-poll-shows/

 

PARIS — The French far right is set for a historic performance in Nice next month.

 

Polling shared exclusively with POLITICO shows Marine Le Pen ally Eric Ciotti has a massive 10-point lead in the race to be mayor of the unofficial capital of the French Riviera.

 

French voters’ willingness to grant Le Pen and her allies control of local executives will be an early indicator of how likely they are to put the far-right National Rally in power in France’s 2027 presidential election.

 

Though Ciotti is not part of the National Rally, his victory in Nice would reverberate far beyond the city’s pristine beaches. Nice, one of France’s biggest cities, is nearly three times more populous than the largest city currently administered by a far-right mayor, Perpignan.

 

Ciotti’s strong performance in the survey, conducted by Cluster17 and the first publicly released poll of its kind, comes as far-right candidates look to make gains across southern France in big cities such as Nîmes and Toulon.

 

Other polls show nearby Marseille, France’s second-largest city, is also in play for the National Rally.

 

A personal contest

The race in Nice reflects both the struggle of traditional center-right forces to hold off the far right and a bitter personal rivalry between Ciotti and incumbent Christian Estrosi, a former member of the conservative Les Républicains party.

 

Estrosi hired Ciotti as a parliamentary assistant after being elected to the French lower house in 1988, and the pair went on to work in tandem until falling out in 2017 shortly after President Emmanuel Macron’s election.

 

Ciotti was president of Les Républicains from 2022 to 2024, but was ousted by his own party in a dramatic fashion after striking a deal with Le Pen’s National Rally without the approval of his troops.

 

Estrosi advocated for a moderate line and left Les Républicains to join Horizons, a center-right party founded by Edouard Philippe, a former prime minister and presidential candidate in 2027.

 

Ciotti is backed by the National Rally in his race. His own party, Union of the Rights for the Republic, blends the far right’s anti-immigration platform while still supporting more liberal, free-market economic policies.

 

Estrosi, who has been in office since 2017, is backed by Les Républicains and Horizons.

 

The two left-wing candidates — Juliette Chesnel-Le Roux of the Green Party and Mireille Damiano of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s France Unbowed movement — are both projected, for now, to clear the 10 percent threshold needed to make the runoff in French local elections, with Chesnel-Le Roux seen obtaining 12 percent of the vote and Damiano 10 percent.

 

But even if they joined forces, the electoral math appears to be working against them in an affluent city with a large retiree population — demographics that don’t usually skew left in France. Should both of them withdraw, it would boost Estrosi’s chances by consolidating voters opposed to the far right behind a single candidate.