France’s Acid Test for 2027

There is a lot to be learned from the municipal election at Paris, last week. The right was expected to win. It was the left that made it — and quite handsomely. The right’s electoral hopes rested, above all, on the abysmal unpopularity of the outgoing socialist mayor, Spanish-born Anne Hidalgo.Under her two consecutive 6-year terms, Paris has been scarred by utopian urban projects, infested by rats, and thrown into debt, to nearly 5,000 euros today per inhabitant today from 1,950 euros an inhabitant in 2014. When she foolishly put herself forward as the Socialist presidential candidate in 2022, she garnered 1.75 percent of the vote nationwide — and 2.18 percent at Paris.The foregone conclusion was thus that a former conservative cabinet minister, Rachida Dati, the deputy mayor for the posh seventh borough since 2008, stood a good chance to be the next mayor. However, the left had not vanished arithmetically. All it needed to be restarted was a new leader. It found one in Madame Hidalgo’s former deputy, Emmanuel Grégoire, at the Hôtel de Ville, the Paris city hall.Monsieur Grégoire’s stroke of genius was, in the last months of Madame Hidalgo’s tenure, to start criticizing her so sharply as to look, implausibly, as the candidate for change. Add to this a certain physical and sartorial elegance, and the fact that, on a Parisian political scene dominated by women — Anne Hidalgo, Rachida Dati, the ultra left-wing Sophia Chikirou, and even the rightist Sarah Knafo, who ran in the first round — he stood out as the only man, something that could appeal both to men and women. An even more clever move on his part was to reject an alliance with Ms. Chikirou. Associating or not associating with France Unbowed, the ultra-left, pro-islamist and antisemitic party led by Ms. Chikirou’s companion, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, has been for years the shibboleth of France’s left and center-left parties. While unpalatable, such an arrangement is seen more often than not as the only way to win an election. The Socialist party resolved in 2024 to join France Unbowed along with the Greens and the Communists into a “New Popular Front” to secure dozens of seats at the National Assembly. As Monsieur Mélenchon’s party grew more extremist and violent by the day, the Front eventually fell apart, but the question was still haunting Socialist, Green, and Communist strategists: How to be elected without it?Monsieur Grégoire read the polls well. He knew that, at Paris, he would win even without Ms. Chikirou’s votes, and that Madame Dati, even with the support of lesser conservative or right-of-center local politicians, would not. No need, then, to talk to Ms. Chikirou. On the contrary, ignoring France Unbowed in Paris was turning him into a credible national leader for the “democratic left,” with an eye to the 2027 presidential election.Ultimately, Monsieur Grégoire was elected on March 22, the election’s second round, with 50.5 percent of the vote, while Madame Dati garnered only 41.5 percent, and Ms. Chikrou nearly 8 percent.Why is the left so powerful at Paris, at least for the time being? Two factors are at play here. First, Paris is a rich city, and many of the rich nowadays feel more comfortable with the liberal or even left-wing worldview than with the conservative one. This is especially true of the meritocratic upper class of executives, academics, or senior civil servants, who constitute 49 percent of the active labor force here, against a national average of 20 percent. In terms of electoral returns, the classic bourgeois West End of Paris is solidly conservative, and the more popular East End solidly left-wing; but gentrified Central Paris, the abode of the liberal rich, has turned Socialist or Green.Second, Paris is not the somewhat secularized Judeo-Christian city you see in the 20th-century movies. It is being reshaped by a vast Islamic immigration from North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, Turkey, and Afghanistan. Some 25 percent of the present City of Paris residents (out of a population of 2 million) and about 40 percent of the youth under 18 are currently estimated to be Muslim. So far, this dynamic community is being co-opted into the socialist galaxy of power, through welfare policies, subsidized housing programs, and a measure of cronyism. How long can the unwritten alliance of the liberal rich and the Muslim community last? The answer is: As long as Muslims have not turned into the dominant demographic group. Once such a threshold is passed, Muslims tend to desert the socialists for France Unbowed, allowing it to win alone (as at Saint-Denis, north of Paris, once the burial place of the French kings and now an African and Maghrebine enclave) or through some sort of redux New Popular Front arrangement (as at Lyon). Clearly, growing numbers of voters and politicians understand what is at stake. While the Grégoire pattern applied as well to Marseille, Strasbourg, and Lille, the classic conservatives not only retained most of their cities, including Toulouse and Tourcoing, but won such hitherto left-wing strongholds such as Bordeaux, Brest, Limoges, and Clermont-Ferrand. As for the National Rally of Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella, which is further to the right, the party failed to offset the classic right in the biggest cities, except Nice, but kept or conquered dozens of midsized cities, from Perpignan to Carcassonne to Montargis. That breakthrough gives it the local foothold it had hitherto lacked.

France’s Acid Test for 2027

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