FRENCH MUNICIPAL ELECTIONS 2020

French voters head to the polls on March 15 and 22 to elect some 35,000 mayors and more than ten times as many councilors. Just over 500,000 council seats are up for grabs in the country’s 34,970 municipalities. All mayoral candidates are required to present gender-balanced “lists”, or tickets, for their council. The seats are allocated on a proportional basis, with a “majority bonus” for towns of more than 1,000 inhabitants. If a single ticket wins more than 50% of votes in the first round, there is no need for a run-off. If there is no outright winner, the tickets that picked up at least 10% of votes face off in a second round. In practice, this can lead to three-way (triangulaire), four-way (quadrangulaire) or even five-way (pentagulaire) contests in round two. There’s a further complication: tickets that won at least 5% of the ballot in the first round are allowed to merge with those that qualified for the run-off.

The electoral process gets even more complex when it comes to France’s three largest cities – Paris, Marseille and Lyon – each of which is divided into arrondissements (districts).

The capital city has 20 arrondissements and 17 separate elections: one for the first four arrondissements, which have been lumped together, and one each for the remaining 16. Marseille has 16 arrondissements distributed across eight sectors, each of which has its own election, while Lyon has a separate election in each of its nine arrondissements.

In all three cities a third of elected councillors sit on the city-wide municipal council (the rest sit only on the district councils). Their number depends on how populous each district is. Thus, the French capital's 15th arrondissement sends 18 councillors to the Conseil de Paris (Paris Council), while the 6th and 8th have just three apiece. The municipal council then goes on to elect the city’s mayor The mayor need not necessarily win the popular vote

All French nationals and European Union citizens aged 18 or above are eligible to vote – meaning Britons lost that right as of January 31, when Brexit became effective.

Due to Britain’s EU divorce, the 760 British local councillors in France – many of them deeply invested in their communities – are also barred from seeking re-election. Their disenfranchisement is a blow to the rural communities that Britons had helped repopulate in recent years, where motivated candidates are often hard to come by.

Mayors are traditionally regarded as France’s most popular – or least unpopular – elected officials, which generally translates into relatively high turnout. However, the worsening coronavirus outbreak looks set to dampen voters’ enthusiasm.