National political context
Votes are being held in 35,000 villages, towns and cities across France.
The centre-left Socialist Party has been campaigning in 2,960 communes and vying for mayor in more than 1,300. In comparison, the far-right National Rally (Rassemblement national or RN) party is fielding its lists of candidates in around 600 different parts of France.
In many of the smaller communes the lists of candidates – if there are more than one – are not affiliated to a specific party.
The vote for local mayors and councillors takes place amid the larger context of French presidential elections slated for next year. President Emmanuel Macron will have served the maximum two consecutive five-year terms when elections are due in April 2027, leaving the field wide open for a successor.
Macron called snap legislative polls in 2024, hoping to consolidate his majority in parliament. But the ploy backfired for his centre-right bloc, which finished in third place, with the anti-immigration, far-right National Rally (Rassemblement national or RN) party becoming the single largest party in the lower chamber.
The National Rally now hopes that it will be better placed than ever to win the presidency in 2027, either by fielding three-time presidential candidate Marine Le Pen, 57, or her deputy and the new face of the party Jordan Bardella, 30.
Le Pen will likely run unless an appeals court upholds her ban from office over a fake jobs scandal in the European Parliament, in which case Bardella becomes the far-right candidate.
Former prime minister Édouard Philippe, who as premier helped steer France through the Covid pandemic, is hoping to keep his seat as mayor of the northern port city of Le Havre, a role he has held since 2014. He and his centre-right Horizons party may be one of the candidates with the best chance of challenging whoever the RN contender might be in 2027.
Read moreThe race for Paris: Will more armed police and more cameras make the city safer?
Who will reign in Paris?
An ambitious right-winger is hoping to head to Paris City Hall after 25 years of the left being in charge of the French capital. Former culture minister Rachida Dati, a 60-year-old of Moroccan-Algerian origin who faces graft accusations, wants to become the second female mayor in a row by taking over from Socialist Anne Hidalgo.
Dati's main rival is 48-year-old Socialist Party candidate Emmanuel Grégoire, Hidalgo's deputy. But the Hidalgo legacy may not help him. While she established kilometres of bike lanes in the capital and helped make the Seine river swimmable for the 2024 Summer Olympics, she remains controversial; as a presidential candidate herself in 2022, she won only 1.7 percent of the vote in the first round before throwing her support to Macron.
Read moreThe race for Paris: How the capital’s housing crisis could determine the city’s next mayor
What of the far right?
In the southern city of Marseille, the country's second-largest, incumbent leftist Mayor Benoît Payan is to go head-to-head with far-right candidate Franck Allisio in the first round.
Marta Lorimer, a politics lecturer at Cardiff University, said the far-right party will be seeking to further "establish themselves" in the municipal vote. "It is important to them that they do well in local elections, because then they can use it to establish some more credibility at the national level," she said.
In French elections, including the 2024 snap polls, diverse parties on the left – from the hardline France Unbowed (La France Insoumise or LFI) through the Communists to the centre-left Socialist Party – have often united, however hesitantly, to prevent a far-right win in the second and final round.
But the fatal beating last month of a right-wing neo-Nazi activist during clashes between far-right and far-left youth groups has prompted some on the left to swear off joining with hard-left groups.
Dominique de Villepin, a former conservative premier, has described the incident as France's "Charlie Kirk moment", referring to the ultraconservative activist shot dead in the United States last year.
But de Villepin warned that the incident could be exploited to "delegitimise part of the political spectrum and cast the triumphant far right as a victim".
Read moreHow the death of far-right activist Quentin Deranque became France’s ‘Charlie Kirk moment’
(FRANCE 24 with AFP)
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