High-stakes local elections take place in France on Sunday. The key question we will soon have the answer to

French voters go to the polls on Sunday to choose their mayors, in an election watched with great interest, considered a test of the power of the extreme right and the resistance of traditional parties in the perspective of next year's presidential elections, reports Reuters.

Presiding over nearly 35,000 localities – from large cities to villages with only a few dozen inhabitants – mayors are France's most trusted elected officials.

Voting started at 8am local time and will end at 8pm. In many medium-sized and large cities, a second round of voting will take place on March 22.

Local results can influence national dynamics, especially when they take place so close to the presidential election, which opinion polls show the far-right National Assembly (RN) could win.

A test for Bardella's party

The RN (Rassemblement National), the anti-immigration and Eurosceptic party led by Jordan Bardella, has so far struggled to make significant gains in municipal elections.

With candidates in several hundred municipalities, the party does not expect a landslide victory, but hopes to demonstrate its growing popularity and achieve some important victories that would further boost its presidential campaign.

“If the people of Marseille make a brave choice … it will encourage and enlighten the French about the choice they will make next year,” Franck Allisio, the RN candidate in France's second-largest city, told Reuters.

Allisio is tied in the first-round polls with incumbent Socialist mayor Benoit Payan, giving the RN a once-unimagined chance to sweep into power in a major French city.

Safety, voters' priority

Of course, the thousands of separate municipal elections often focus on strictly local issues.

But opinion polls show that safety is voters' top priority in this election, which aligns perfectly with the RN's emphasis on law and order.

Among the larger cities targeted by the RN is Toulon, in the south of the country, with a population of 180,000.

The party could also win in Menton, a city on the French Riviera where Louis, the son of former president Nicolas Sarkozy, is a candidate backed by centrist parties.

Will there be alliances with the radical right?

A key question is what alliances the RN will make with other parties between the two rounds.

Will this be the election in which the decades-long tradition of rejecting the extreme right will be broken? Some, particularly in mainstream right-wing parties, are tempted to do so.

The left did well across France in the last municipal elections in 2020. It is now weakened nationally.

It will be closely watched if he can keep Paris, as well as some of the cities he won last time, such as Nantes for the Socialists or Lyon and Strasbourg for the Greens.

It will also be crucial if the mainstream left parties form alliances between the two rounds with the far-left party France Unbowed.

A second round will be held on March 22 in all cities where no list gets more than 50% of the vote.

While there may be more lessons to be learned from the second round than from the first, the entire election campaign has high stakes for the parties given the approaching April 2027 presidential election.

“People want to turn the page and they want to turn it with us,” Perpignan RN mayor Louis Aliot told Reuters.