the 5 lessons of the second round

A France in the grip of fragmentation and democratic fatigue: such is the vintage of the 2026 municipal elections. Participation (57%), in decline since 1983, has reached a new low, with the exception of 2020, the year of Covid.

In medium and large cities, the high number of triangulars and quadrangulars testifies to the fragmentation of the political offer. The electoral contests were tense and saw the extremes strengthen.

Finally, a year before Emmanuel Macron’s departure, “macronism”, lacking local roots, fails, with a few cases, to find its translation in the electoral field: its supporters had to choose, according to their sensitivities, the moderate right or left.

1. The decline of environmentalists

The 2020 green wave is receding. Of the cities won six years ago, the environmentalist group lost Bordeaux (Gironde), Poitiers (Vienne), Besançon (Doubs), Annecy (Haute-Savoie), Strasbourg (Bas-Rhin), where the former socialist councilor Catherine Trautmann, who came out of retirement to fight against “authoritarian ecology”, defeated Jeanne Barseghian. Also lost the bastion of Bègles conquered in 1989. Even in Lyon, where Grégory Doucet was narrowly re-elected with the support of LFI, The Ecologists no longer control the Rhône metropolis with broad prerogatives, which has shifted to the right.

2. Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s strategy of brutalization: a divided left, contrasting results

“There will be no national agreement with LFI,” declared the evening of the first round, March 15, 2026, the secretary general of the Socialist Party, Olivier Faure.

The next day, in Toulouse (Haute-Garonne), in Nantes (Loire-Atlantique), led by Johanna Rolland, the number 2 of the PS, in Grenoble (Isère), in Clermont-Ferrand (Puy-de-Dôme), in Brest (Finistère), in Limoges (HauteVienne), in Avignon (Vaucluse), in Tulle (Corrèze), in Aubervilliers (Seine-SaintDenis), in Lorient (Morbihan) – but not in Paris or Marseille – the socialists merged with La France insoumise (LFI), strong in its push into working-class suburbs and city centers.

Agreements that Faure says he “understands perfectly” even if he had denounced, two weeks earlier, “the conspiratorial caricatures and the intolerable anti-Semitic remarks of Jean Luc Mélenchon”.

Between ecologists and LFI, it was also time for reunions in Strasbourg, in Tours (Indre-et-Loire), in Lyon, where the green mayors were in difficulty, except in Bordeaux. But at the time of the vote, the radicalization of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s speech and program, this strategy of stifling the moderate left did not work everywhere.

If it is a winner in metropolises like Nantes and Lyon, the strategy of union with LFI leads to failures in medium-sized cities, historic left-wing strongholds such as Tulle, Clermont, Brest, Avignon and fails to win Limoges and Toulouse. Conversely, in Marseille (Bouches-du-Rhône), Lille (North), Rennes (Ille-et Vilaine), Pau (Pyrénées-Atlantiques), Le Mans (Sarthe), the PS candidates who had refused the alliance with LFI win.

The credibility of the PS leadership takes a hit. “LFI made us lose, there is no more room for strategic ambiguity,” denounces, by way of mea culpa, the boss of the PS deputies, Boris Vallaud. For LFI, according to Ifop expert François Kraus, it is “a political victory”, but not an electoral one: due to a lack of candidates presented in rural and medium-sized municipalities, “the rebellious lists are far from calling into question the leadership of the traditional forces of the left”.

3. A union “of all rights” halfway

Officially, the watchword on the right is the refusal of alliances with the extreme right. But this principled position does not exclude contortions. On the Republican side, Bruno Retailleau calls, on the evening of the first round, not to give “a voice to LFI” while Jordan Bardella extends his hand to the “sincere” right.

This is because beyond the instructions of the staff, the lines move in the secrecy of the voting booths. The RN’s quest for respectability, the rise of a discourse consistent with the wishes of the majority of public opinion on security and immigration control, are bringing together the electorates.

According to the Ipsos institute, only 21% of right-wing supporters say they are opposed to a rapprochement with the RN in the second round. In many small towns, far from partisan labels, supporters of all the right-wing groups can already be found on joint lists.

In the medium-sized towns where it has progressed and especially in the south of France, the RN has been able to recover figures from the traditional right: in Perpignan, the former LR mayor Jean-Marc Pujol thus gave his support, on the eve of the first round, to his RN successor, Louis Alliot.

Did the voters therefore impose this union of the rights at the polls? It depends on local situations. Yes, in Nice (Alpes-Maritimes), the fifth largest city in France, where Éric Ciotti succeeded in his challenge to expand the electorate of the RN to that of the classic right, or in Nîmes (Gard), where a section of the various right-wing voters in the first round switched to the RN (without making it win, however). No in Paris, where Rachida Dati does not convince all centrist and Reconquest voters!, nor in Toulon (Var) where LR supporters did not vote for the RN candidate. Conversely, it is, for example, the transfer of RN voters to Brest which ensures the victory of the right-wing candidate.

4. A National Gathering taking root

The goal set by Jordan Bardella was to conquer “dozens of cities”. Bet won. Cagnes-sur-Mer (Alpes-Maritimes) from the first round with a 29-year-old candidate, small towns in Gard and Pas-de-Calais, Agde (Hérault), Carpentras (Vaucluse), La Flèche (Sarthe), Menton (Alpes-Maritimes), Castres (Tarn), Carcassonne (Aude), Montargis (Loiret)…

The surge in the cities where he had already presented himself, especially in the south, is undeniable. But in the big cities, it is a fiasco (1.61% of the vote in Paris, 7.07% in Lyon). At the local level, the RN cannot claim to be “the leading party in France”, as it proclaimed after its victory in the 2024 European elections. There was a lack of candidates. Implementation at the local level takes time and requires credible and identified frameworks which are lacking in sufficient numbers today.

The only consolation, significant: almost all the outgoing RN mayors were re-elected in the first round, from Hénin-Beaumont (Pas-de-Calais) to Perpignan (Pyrénées-Orientales), the only city with more than 100,000 inhabitants held. Where it governs, the RN can boast of having obtained a discharge from its constituents.

5. A dress rehearsal before the 2027 presidential election

All the staffs of the political parties have in mind the election for the presidency of the Republic in 2027. However, the municipal elections of 2026 were the last direct election before the meeting in the spring of next year. In the large urban centers at least, the choices of alliance or confrontation seem to have been dictated by the preparation of the supreme election.

The joint lists between right-wing Macronists and LR elected officials in Paris, in the west of the Parisian suburbs, in Bordeaux behind Thomas Cazenave (Renaissance), in Nantes behind Foulques Chombart de Lauwe (LR) appear as so many testing grounds for a possible common and unique candidacy of a bloc formed by the right and the center.

On the left, the 2026 municipal elections could accelerate the recomposition. For Jean-Luc Mélenchon, probable LFI candidate in 2027, the capture of Roubaix confirms his strategy. In the large northern city, as in the northern suburbs of Paris, characterized by a high percentage of populations with an immigrant background, the challenge of addressing as a priority “the new France” and its voters was a winner.

Aged 74, the tribune knows that he is fighting his last fight and does not forget that in 2017 he lost qualification for the second round by 600,000 votes. Aspiring to the supreme office, Raphaël Glucksmann (Place publique, PP) condemned the mergers of the left and environmentalist lists with those of France Insoumise: his candidates withdrew each time.

The champion of the social-democratic left of the Europeans of 2024 ostensibly stages the duel he hopes for next year, against Jean-Luc Mélenchon. And now justifies his refusal to participate in a primary with the environmentalists, “who make alliances with LFI”.

At the other end of the political spectrum, the RN wants to see in these results the confirmation of its irresistible rise at a time when all the polls give its next candidate for the Elysée, whoever they may be, far ahead in the first round.

Individually, the re-election in Le Havre (Seine-Maritime) of Édouard Philippe, against his communist and RN adversaries, confirms his status as presumed favorite candidate in the center. The victories of the communist Fabien Roussel elected in Saint-Amand-les-Eaux (North), of the sovereignist Nicolas Dupont-Aignan in Yerres (Essonne), of the liberal David Lisnard in Cannes (AlpesMaritimes), elected in the first round and declared candidates for the race for the Elysée have the value of a “warming round” to use the words of political scientist Jérôme Jaffré.