Paris and Marseille, the two most important cities in France, remain in the hands of socialists who refused to ally themselves with candidates from France Insoumise (LFI) and established themselves as a dam for the right, while other colleagues in the ranks reaped the meager fruits of their pacts with the radical left-wing party.
“Paris will be the heart of the resistance against the extreme right,” said the new councilor of the capital, who for years was the mayor’s number two and who will prolong the control of the city by his party that began 25 years ago, after beating the former conservative minister, who had the explicit support of the extreme right.
Grégoire, who will be inaugurated next weekend, made a national reading of his victory, ahead of next year’s presidential elections, which he predicted would be “violent and crucial” and in which he criticized the alliance of the traditional right with which, in his opinion, “he is emerging.”
“The masks have fallen and we must denounce these alliances to earn some points,” said Grégoire, who, after his speech, went out to tour the city by bicycle, a ride broadcast live on television, to one of which he gave his first interview of the night while pedaling to City Hall to embrace Hidalgo, who gave him the key to the city, in front of a crowd.
Bad harvest of pacts with ‘melenchonistas’
The first to make a gloomy diagnosis was the general secretary of the Socialist Party (PS), Pierre Jouvet, who accused the party of “making the left lose” in socialist bastions – such as Clermont-Ferrand or Limoges – or green bastions – such as Poitiers and Besançon – whose outgoing mayors had merged their lists with LFI.
“These results are a failure of the approach of the leadership of the Socialist Party,” declared former president François Hollande.
The leader of the party, , appealed to reflection and criticized the radio left for its rupture speech, while pointing out that the PS “is the main one of the French left”, with its sights set on the presidential elections.
“The Socialist Party dragged us with it,” complained Mélenchon, asserting that LFI has “saved many lists of the old traditional left”: “We are a useful force where others are simply directionless opportunists,” he declared.
Yes, the pacts with Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s party were decisive for the socialists in Nantes and for the environmentalists in Lyon – where they won with only 3,000 votes difference, according to official data – but the environmentalist wave of 2020 deflated and lost Bordeaux, Strasbourg, Poitiers and Annecy.
LFI, which was running for the first time in the municipal elections, won its main victory last Sunday in the first round, taking over the second most important city in the Paris region, Saint-Denis, with 150,000 inhabitants, many of them immigrants, like the brand new mayor Bally Bagayoko, a Frenchman of Malian origin who took office this Saturday with a dance, already viral.
Today it added Roubaix, and many other cities in the urban belts of Paris and Lyon, which host a large immigrant population.
The extreme right advances, but less than expected
Although the extreme right managed to conquer Nice with the victory of Éric Ciotti, an ally of , in the fifth largest city in France, it could not take the Marseille trophy.
In this way, Nice, the Mediterranean town, with 360,000 inhabitants, will become the largest bastion of the French extreme right, which also added cities such as Carcassonne, Orange, Castres or Carpentras to its already fiefdoms such as Perpignan.
It did not manage, however, to prevail in other municipalities in the Mediterranean area such as Toulon or Nîmes.
“This is a great victory and a confirmation of the local implementation strategy of the National Rally,” said Marine Le Pen, on her X account.
His right-hand man and president of the party, Jordan Bardella, also celebrated the victories, with some 1,300 mayors elected throughout the country under his initials in this second round, which represents “the beginning of an alternation that must, tomorrow, be embodied on a national scale,” he said with an eye toward the 2027 presidential elections.
Participation, according to the polls, stood at 57% of the census, which would mean a record abstention if the 2020 elections, held in the middle of the pandemic, are excluded, when it was 41.86%. In 2014, 62.13% of those registered in the second round of municipal elections voted and in 2008, 65.24%.
