French far right struggles to deliver its decisive breakthrough

PARIS — The far-right National Rally had reason to hope this month’s French municipal elections would show it now has an unstoppable momentum before the presidential race in 2027.

After all, the party has been on a steady upward trajectory during this election cycle, with polls showing Jordan Bardella, the party’s president, as the frontrunner ahead of next year’s campaign.

But while its candidates did very well in Sunday’s first round, particularly in important southern cities such as Marseille and Toulon, it looks like Marine Le Pen’s troops are still falling short of the decisive breakthrough they seek.

The party’s heavyweights are avoiding any triumphalism after the first-round results, knowing that they now face their perennial stumbling block: A second round in which numerous other parties can club together to keep it out of power.

This has always been the National Rally’s political vulnerability — most conspicuously for Le Pen and her father Jean-Marie in presidential contests — and it is not clear that it has shattered that glass ceiling. In cities such as Marseille, Toulon and Nîmes, where its candidates performed strongly on Sunday, they could find themselves in trouble in the second round.

The National Rally’s party leaders are appealing to other right-wing candidates to join them to try to beat left-leaning opponents in the second round on March 22. But for now, the complex dynamic of ad hoc alliances that shape local races seems more likely to work against them once again.

“We have 60 cities where we came out first, [where] we think it’s within reach,” National Rally Vice-President Sébastien Chenu said on RTL radio on Monday. “Then there are cities … where we are open to alliances with rival lists” from the right, he added.

The problem for the party is that nobody is rushing to take this olive branch.

By contrast, other parties are locked in talks about whether and how to join forces against the far right — even if that conversation is proving trickier than in past cycles due to deep divisions between left-wing parties and uncertainty about voter intentions.

Sun belt in focus

Marseille, France’s second-biggest city, perfectly illustrates both the National Rally’s advances and its dilemma.

National Rally candidate Franck Allisio (35 percent) almost tied with incumbent left-wing Mayor Benoît Payan (36.7 percent) in the first round. That’s more than 15 percentage points higher than the National Rally’s previous score in the 2020 local election.  

Still, Allisio now faces an uphill battle to beat the current mayor, with the two main centrist and conservative forces discussing the best strategy to beat him shortly after polls closed.  The conservative candidate, who came third, will not be pulling out — reducing the prospect of her votes going to Allisio.

In Nîmes, another key target in the National Rally’s sun belt, the calculus is different. Its candidate, the prominent politician Julien Sanchez, came first but will now face one opponent from the center right and one from the center left, who are better placed because they are expected to pick up the votes of candidates who won’t be represented in the second round. 

In Toulon, National Rally candidate Laure Lavalette, a personal friend of Le Pen, landed an impressive 42 percent of the vote on Sunday. However, it is predicted that she will struggle to attract more voters in the second round, putting her center-right rival in a strong position.

Asked about this potential disappointment in a city that the far right had been eyeing as a top prize, party heavyweight and MP Jean-Philippe Tanguy said on radio France Inter: “An election is never a done deal.”

But he stressed that the National Rally now has a “strong presence in the runoffs across the whole country … that is a change because before the National Rally could be strong in some areas and a bit absent in others. Today, it is present almost everywhere.”

The city of Nice, on the French Riviera, is the big prize most likely to land in the far right’s hands next Sunday, but political observers have been quick to note that candidate Eric Ciotti, if he wins, will have prevailed in very specific circumstances.  

Ciotti is a local political baron and was president of Les Républicains from 2022 to 2024. He only joined forces with Le Pen’s National Rally after a dramatic political coup on the traditional center right.

He in fact downplayed his alliance with the National Rally during the campaign, keeping party leaders Le Pen and Bardella at arm’s length.

Expectation management

During the campaign, the National Rally leadership was careful not to project unrealistic expectations, adopting a cautious tone even days ahead of the first round.

Party figures all had a precedent in mind, mindful of the 2024 snap elections, another case of their traditional second-round Achilles heel. The far right had done well in the first round, but failed to deliver as many seats as they hoped after opponents teamed up against them ahead of the runoff.

National Rally President Bardella picked a safe place to speak from on Sunday night — Beaucaire, a small city in the south of France that the party was all but guaranteed to win. He took the stand barely five minutes after polls closed to deliver a short, restrained speech, referencing the “serious, honest work” of outgoing National Rally mayors. 

“These results reveal an expectation that we know is immense,” he said. 

Still, Jean-Yves Dormagen, a political scientist and head of polling institute Cluster17, said the National Rally shouldn’t be underestimated in this election.

“In the cities where it was competing, it is scoring very high. Now the question of whether they will win is another question, it depends on how voters add up [in the runoffs].”

He stressed that results in large cities, closely watched by the media, tend to overshadow what’s happening in smaller constituencies all over the country.

“None of this really gives us much of a clue about what 2027 will be like.”