00:00France's mainstream left prevailed in Sunday's municipal elections to retain control of the
00:05country's three biggest cities, while the far right failed to take any major urban centre.
00:11The elections were seen as a test of both the depth of the far right support base a year ahead
00:15of presidential elections, and the resilience of mainstream parties in a fragmented political
00:20landscape. In Paris, Emmanuel Grégoire, a socialist little known to the French public,
00:25was elected mayor of Paris, beating out prominent conservative contender Rashida Dati.
00:31Nicolas Rushworth tells us more about the new leader of the French capital.
00:39Paris has a new mayor, Emmanuel Grégoire. He's celebrated with a bike ride, his win after a
00:45tense campaign, and under a list of united left and greens, extends the socialist quarter-century
00:50rule in the French capital.
00:54Tonight, this victory represents a promise, a demanding one, the triumph of a certain
00:59vision of Paris, a vibrant, progressive Paris, for the people, a Paris for everyone.
01:07Emmanuel Grégoire was a deputy to outgoing mayor Anne Hidalgo. Relations between them
01:12had been poor after she accused him of failing to back her unsuccessful 2022 presidential bid.
01:20Grégoire was born in the working-class Parisian suburb of Saint-Saint-Denis, into a family
01:25with roots in the Communist Party. He was a consultant in the medical sector before turning
01:29to politics. His win now comes as France gears up for next year's presidential race, with
01:35the far right eyeing its best chance yet to claim the country's top office.
01:40From Monday, our country enters its next democratic challenge, the 2027 presidential election.
01:47We had a taste of it during these municipal elections. The battle for France will be brutal,
01:52violent and crucial.
01:55He has said he feels he's sometimes portrayed as dull when he is super cheerful, always laughing
02:00and really down to earth. He has pledged to increase the number of green spaces and the
02:06number of bike lanes in Paris.
02:10Well, to break down the results of the municipal elections, we're joined now by Renaud Foucaire,
02:16who's a senior lecturer at Lancaster University. Thank you very much for being with us on France 24.
02:22I'd like to start by talking about the far right. I mean, the national rally, as I said,
02:27it didn't win any of those major urban centres that it had been eyeing, but it did do well in
02:32its
02:32strongholds. What do you make of the overall picture about the kinds of support for the national rally?
02:40It's a very regional party when you look at the local elections. It's very strange because it's the
02:45number one party in the polls on the presidential election, in parliamentary election. But when it comes
02:50to local, to grassroots support, it seems that at the moment, the national rally barely exists outside
02:56of the north and the deep south of the country, which means that in terms of 2027, which is, of
03:03course,
03:03the main horizon of all French politicians, when the name on the ballots will not be Le Pen, as it's
03:10always been in every single presidential election, there will be a question of how much support there
03:16would be for someone who is called, for instance, Jordan Bardella, who is the front runner to run for a
03:22national rally, in places where there was national rally maybe 10, 15 years ago. And now all those big cities
03:29from Bordeaux, from Lyon, they will have zero national rally representation in the municipal councils.
03:36Yeah, you're referring to the uncertainty around Marine Le Pen's candidacy for those elections,
03:42as she awaits a result in her appeals trial for an embezzlement conviction. Meanwhile, though,
03:48the socialists, they've been long weakened on the national scale, but they did well in the big cities.
03:54What could this mean for the left and the centre-left heading towards these presidential elections?
04:02I think the big challenge for the centre-left will be to manage what they have to think about
04:08of a strategy of the second round. So presidential election in France has two rounds. First, you need
04:13to qualify and then you need to win. So if they want to hope to get to the second round,
04:18they need to
04:18talk to voters on the left, but also to voters who currently support Jean-Luc Mélenchon's far left. So they
04:24need to be strong there. But the problem when they do that is that in the second round, supporting
04:30Jean-Luc Mélenchon seemed to be extremely divisive. So if you had a lot of cities within localities
04:36where the left was overall a majority, where there were alliances between the left and the far left,
04:41but they failed to win because centrist voters are really, really scared by Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
04:47So if they want to have a hope to have a centre-left candidate to the second round,
04:51they will have to walk a very, very tight rope to qualify. As for the far left, they seem to
04:56have
04:56a very strong basis, perhaps stronger than expected. So they failed to win any meaningful big city.
05:03They were not particularly good in terms of winning even smaller ones, but still everywhere they get
05:08those 10% that make them very hard to ignore for the centre-left and clearly a big, big, big
05:14strategic
05:15difficulty for the next elections for them. So if then the lesson for the socialists or the Greens
05:21or the Communists is that they do better without linking up with France unbowed, what does that
05:28mean for the elections in 2027? Does that put two competing visions of the French left going head to head?
05:37So two competing versions, but it's not that much that they do better when they are not with France unbowed.
05:42They cannot ignore them. I think the Greens are the best examples because the Greens, unlike the
05:47Socialist Party, at the national level, they've stayed very, very far away from the current government.
05:53So they've been together almost on a de facto alliance with France unbowed. So the Greens, they had
05:59mails in several big cities and they lost many of them. I think the Greens are the only big losers
06:05of
06:05yesterday's election. And the problem is that they were in those alliances, but they failed to win
06:11new voters. But if they didn't ally with France unbowed, they would have lost those voters on the
06:16left. And so the real difficulty for them is to try to reconcile those two lefts. And in a two
06:23-round
06:23system, it's possible, but the most likely scenario, in my opinion right now, is that none of the left
06:29party qualify for the second round because there is too much division between them. And so there is a
06:34large avenue right now for a centre-right candidate to qualify against Bardella and to have a larger
06:40chance to win than any left candidate at the moment.
06:43Well, speaking of former Prime Minister, Edouard Philippe was re-elected mayor in the port city of
06:50Le Havre. He has already announced his candidacy for the presidential race and he's seen as one of
06:55the main contenders for the centre. How much of a boost does this result give his presidential hopes?
07:02He was not in a very, very good place two weeks ago. He's in a much better place today,
07:07let's put it that way. So he's not someone who is doing incredibly well in the polls. He was kind
07:13of a de facto favourite because it seems there is basically nobody else. Gabriel Attal, perhaps the
07:19other possible heir of Emmanuel Macron, but he's doing even worse than Philippe in the polls. So his hope is
07:26that he's been there, he's waiting for the moment, and he has something that a lot of the other
07:31possible candidates don't have, is that he has this credibility of being a man who represents Le Havre,
07:37which is clearly a working class city, a place that has more communist roots than a centre-right one.
07:44And he's there, he's proven that he can talk to, say, normal people. And also he has, I think, this
07:50credibility of having a very right-wing discourse in terms of migration, security.
07:56And so in a second round against Bardella, I think he would be in a very good position. The question
08:02is, what happens until 2027? And can he qualify to this second round? And this is something that someone like
08:09him who doesn't have, like, massive charisma is, I think, always looking to his left and to his right to
08:15see if there is someone more charismatic, more visible, who will emerge in the coming months.
08:19Okay, well, how can we interpret the overall turnout? This was 57%, so the country's lowest in local polls, except
08:27for the pandemic edition in 2020. Does this reflect a population disenchanted by politics?
08:35It reflects an election that was mostly local politics, and I think it's largely a great thing. One of the
08:41reasons why there is no visible winner in that election is that no one could go and vote against Emmanuel
08:48Macron in the election.
08:49So people had to look at very local issues and put the most competent or their preferred local person. In
08:57many places, there was barely any competition because France has a lot of very small communes, but also even in
09:05places when there was competition, it was not super intense.
09:08But in a way, it's also why, like, today we can look at this map of France, and we can
09:13look at what people actually really want. And this gives us this really strange regional picture with, you know, in
09:19Paris, what people really like is the mobility plans of Delano and Hidalgo.
09:24They just want to cycle, and there will be no right-wing candidate to win until they go on a
09:28bike. In other parts, they care about security. In other parts, they care about the economy. And they voted according
09:34to their local needs.
09:35And I think this map will prove very useful for the next elections. And as for participation, I think people
09:42are obviously less likely to participate when an election is not too polarizing.
09:47And I think somehow, maybe in those days, it's a good news not to be too polarizing.
09:51And just before we run out of time, I wanted to ask you, because we've just heard this Monday, that
09:56former French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin has died aged 88.
10:00He, a socialist, he withdrew from politics after the far-right leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, beat him and his
10:09party to the second round of presidential elections in 2002.
10:13His voters then backed Jacques Chirac to block the far-right from power.
10:18This time on, are we still seeing this Republican front, as it's called, where rival parties band together to shut
10:25out the far-right?
10:28Well, time has changed quite a lot since this massive demonstration against Jean-Marie Le Pen.
10:35Lionel Jospin was an incredible state person.
10:38The man was the harsh favorite to win the presidential election, but he failed to qualify by a very tiny
10:44margin.
10:45But there was no discussion.
10:46Everyone was against Jean-Marie Le Pen to defend French democracy.
10:50The problem at the moment in France is that you have a large front against the far-left, a medium
10:58front against the far-right, and a lot of people who think that defending French democracy means doing without only
11:04one of the two.
11:06And I think, no, right now, perhaps the brand of the far-right is much less toxic, which can be
11:12either a good or a bad news.
11:13It's a good news because it means that Le Pen and Bardella are not like Jean-Marie Le Pen.
11:18They are not having those permanent, anti-Semitic, racist, homophobic outbursts that are perhaps more within the French Republic.
11:26But at the same time, it means that the French are perhaps ready to have perhaps less traditionally democratic party.
11:33And we've seen in Hungary, we've seen in Slovakia, we've seen in Poland at some point that this can be
11:37very dangerous for your institutions when you stop protecting your democracy.
11:42All right. Renaud Foucault from Lancaster University. Thank you very much. We'll have to leave it there.
