Our view on French local elections: Is the candidate personality the decisive factor?
The progression of the Rassemblement national’s local presence (RN-Far right), the upsurge of La France Insoumise (LFI-Far left) in municipal life, the integration, even reinforcement of LR (Republicans) in towns except in metropolitan areas and large conurbations where the Socialist Party has resisted well, the setback for the Greens: since Sunday evening, political commentators have been piling up analyses of the local elections results. Yet each of these indisputable observations can be challenged by counterexamples, showing that overall trends are not enough to explain the results on a case-by-case basis. What the results really reveal is the weight of individuals, to the point where one may wonder whether the decisive factor, the one that makes a difference, is not the personality of the mayor candidate. The examples and expressions of this influence are many.
The right profile
Although the Greens lost most of the towns they won in 2020, as well as the Lyon metropolitan area, they held their ground at Lyon municipal level because their opponent, Jean‑Michel Aulas, while very well-known and respected locally as former OL football team president and businessman, failed to assume the role of a municipal candidate, to create campaign momentum and, moreover, multiplied communication missteps, both on social media and in the way he ran his campaign. In Paris, the highly cliving personality of Rachida Dati explains her defeat: it prevented her from benefiting from all the transfers of votes she should have received in light of first‑round political trends. At the same time, and in contrast to, Emmanuel Grégoire, less well‑known and more consensual, managed to win part of Pierre‑Yves Bournazel’s (Center) electorate over, as well as abstentionists.
Electoral advantage of the incumbents
This is a well‑known phenomenon: in local elections, the hardest part is winning a first term. Re‑election is easier, if not the norm. This is nothing new: J. Chaban‑Delmas had been mayor of Bordeaux for 47 years and Gaston Defferre had hold the mayoralty of Marseille for 33 years. In 2026, André Santini, mayor of Issy‑les‑Moulineaux without interruption since 1983, is the most striking example. Hospitalised, he was unable to campaign for its re-election, yet that did not stop him from being overwhelmingly re‑elected for an eighth term. At the same time, in Toulouse, the merger of LFI and Socialist lists, which in theory involved a majority based on first‑round results, stumbled over the incumbent mayor Jean‑Luc Moudenc, in office since 2014 after a first term between 2004 and 2008, whose vote total rose sharply between the two rounds. In Nantes, Johanna Rolland was re‑elected after merging with the LFI list, whereas in Rennes, Nathalie Appéré, also a Socialist, won despite having refused such a merger. These councillors have succeeded in building roots that shift how they are perceived, from national politics to a more local register of management, continuity and proximity. Still, over successive terms they must manage to retain their local “electoral appeal”. Failing to do so cost the mayor of Clermont‑Ferrand a term that had been held by the left continuously since 1945. And in Liévin, voters last Sunday put an end to 100 years of Socialist rule at city hall. As for André Laignel, first elected in Issoudun in 1977 during the vague rose, he was unable to reach the milestone of a ninth term.
From local to presidential election
These observations are the most interesting because local elections are paradoxically the ones that most closely look like the presidential contest. Unlike the legislative elections and, even more so, the European elections, where national political trends largely outweigh candidates’ personality, local elections are above all, as seen here, a matter of choosing people. These elections are about the encounter between a person and their team, and a territory, around a local project. This is what Catherine Trautmann has just achieved brilliantly in Strasbourg, 25 years after the defeat that prevented her from serving a third consecutive term. The presidential election is the encounter between a woman or a man and the country around the evolution of the national narrative. The key to success is the ability to move beyond one’s electoral base and build a broader coalition. For politicians and their communicators, the question then becomes how to embody without confining, how to stand out without fuelling excessive polarisation, how to turn a political identity into a lever for support rather than a trigger for rejection. The next answer will come in May 2027.
Eric Giuily Matthieu Meunier
President of CLAI Account Manager