There are close to 35,000 communes — villages, towns and cities — in France, all of which have mayors presiding over a Conseil municipal. Over the next two weekends, voters will, in theory, decide whether to re-elect the incumbents or replace them through the usual two-round process. In reality, however, in 23,679 of the smallest communes — roughly two-thirds of the total — voters will have no real choice at all. One single list is standing, often composed of candidates who agreed to run again only reluctantly.

Being a mayor in France is often an unpaid and thankless task: acting as the de facto interface between your fellow citizens and the might of the centralized French administrative system, over which you have little real power. Someone will always be unhappy with your decisions — and if they want to complain, they know exactly where you live.

All the same, polls over the years consistently show that municipal elections are the ones the French prefer. The issues are local, and mayors — unlike MPs and senators, who are often seen as distant from everyday life — are generally perceived as closely connected to their voters. When, in one of French politics’ recurrent purity drives, President François Hollande introduced a bill soon after his 2014 election banning le cumul des mandats (the practice of holding both national and local elected office), it was hailed as a pushback against political privilege. Instead, it resulted in a further separation of Paris and the rest of the country. Députés-maires and sénateurs-maires could and did become powerful local barons, one of the reasons Paris had resented them for centuries. Yet political life without them got worse.

Emmanuel Macron’s 2017 “yellow wave” brought in a vast intake of unknown and untried MPs, who prided themselves in being “amateurs”. The Yellow Vest protest movement of 2018 was as sharp an answer as possible: the amateurs, starting with Le Président, were ignorant of, and ignoring, the people.

Given that the last municipales were controversially held during Covid, with far fewer voters venturing to polling stations, the 2026 elections are expected to serve as an early verdict on French politics under Macron. They will also act as a forerunner to next year’s presidential race, in which Macron himself cannot run again. Polls predict a National Rally rise under Jordan Bardella’s stewardship, as Marine Le Pen awaits the appeal ruling on her ineligibility sentence of last year, when she was convicted of misappropriating European Parliament funds for her party’s domestic operation.

But “a rise” could be very different from victory. Not unlike its infinitely more successful Italian counterpart, Giorgia Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia, the Rally is weak at organizing grassroots. Bardella is fielding lists in only 550 of France’s 3,189 communes, numbering over 3,500 inhabitants. It is running in only 34 of France’s over 100,000 municipalities. And it has credible hopes of getting to City Hall in a couple of dozen of the former, and about 10 of the latter.

Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise has even fewer hopes of winning a city on its own. Nevertheless, it has candidates in a couple of hundred communes where the Left would lose without them.

The other major trend across France is growing disappointment, sometimes even outright disgust, with Green management in the cities the party won six years ago, whether alone or in coalition. In Paris, Lyon, Grenoble, Strasbourg and Bordeaux, rejection of Ulez, no-car policies, new taxes, and re-zoning have caused middle-class flight and the disappearance of high street shops. French Greens, unlike their German counterparts, are no public managers, and shy away from any suggestion of compromise.

Is this the face of the new France? Exhausted wonks have tried to grab at reasons for, if not optimism, at least evidence that some things do not change. The Paris mayoral election presents an interesting dynamic. On one side, Eric Zemmour’s talented partner, Sarah Knafo, has reached 10% in the polls. On the other hand, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s girlfriend, Sophia Chikirou, who has reversed the usual political evolution by starting as a centrist in her 20s, and now pushing the outside of the identitarian envelope as a France Insoumise firebrand.

Municipal elections have rarely predicted presidential ones, but they’ve also set the stage for deeper national trends. It’s entirely possible that one of the most popular political personalities in France, former PM Edouard Philippe, a moderate centrist who was Mayor of Le Havre for 12 years overall, will lose his seat to a communist defending the city’s beleaguered dockers. If this were to happen, he has promised he will give up his projected presidential run. By Monday, we may see a new political landscape after all.

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Anne-Elisabeth Moutet is a Paris-based journalist and political commentator.

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