 |
llustration by Natália Delgado/POLITICO
French
far right claims momentum for presidency after local elections
Marine Le
Pen's National Rally failed to win big target cities such as Marseille, Toulon
and Nîmes, but the party still thinks it has the upper hand nationwide.
By CLEA
CAULCUTT
in Paris
March 23,
2026 4:00 am CET
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 third-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 and Alexandre Léchenet contributed to this report.
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário