France’s Communists Hold Back the Far Right, for Now
Blue-collar voters in northern France are often seen as a natural base for Marine Le Pen’s surging far right. Yet while her party has made major inroads in this electorate, local elections saw Communists resist what seemed like inevitable defeat.
French municipal elections revealed a slow and steady advances for the far right but also signs that the Left is far from dead if it can continue to deliver locally. (Sameer al-Doumy / AFP via Getty Images)
The setting of Émile Zola’s 1885 novel, Germinal, is nothing if not bleak. In the northern French mining settlement where the book takes place, the roads were “black like mourning trim,” the village “dead . . . draped in its shroud.” “The wide streets, divided into small terraced gardens, remained deserted between four large uniform buildings,” Zola writes. It’s a kind of social realism that has long shaped the collective idea of what the old industrial north is like.
Visiting Méricourt, one of the many former mining villages that dot northern France, that image feels far from present reality. The corots — uniform brick buildings built by the companies to house workers — remain. So, too, does the terril — a mound of dirt resembling a small hill that forms through the excavation of dirt to clear way for the mining tunnels. But otherwise the town had been utterly transformed. Construction workers spilled out of a fry shop, and the municipal parking lot in front of the town hall was filled with cars. By 1 p.m., every table at the Le Petit Bossu bistrot, recently bought by the city government and rented out to two young locals, had been occupied.
Standing in front of the former train depot, where locomotives once transported raw materials out of the region, Florent Le Mazel pointed to a series of triangular buildings in the distance. “We’re on a former mining site — pit 4-5 South — and it’s been turned into an eco-neighborhood,” Le Mazel, Mericourt’s director of cultural affairs, explained. The main depot had been converted into a library and cultural center where the night before a theater troupe had put on a performance to a sold-out crowd of over a hundred people.
The urban renewal project was one of the flagship measures of former Mayor Bernard Baude, a longtime member of the French Communist Party (PCF). Baude, fifty-four, served as mayor here between 2002 and 2026, after taking over for Léandre Létoquart, also from the Communists, whose reign lasted more than three decades. Méricourt, home to about 12,000 people, has voted Communist in every municipal election since 1919, making it one of the cities with the longest-serving PCF-led city councils across France.
That remained the case on Sunday, March 15. In the first mayoral elections held since 2020, Fabrice Planque, Baude’s deputy, won by a margin of 57.15 percent to 42.85 percent. While the victory wasn’t as resounding as during Baude’s previous 2020 run, where he was elected with roughly two-thirds of the votes, it showed the PCF’s staying power.
In places like Méricourt, the rise of the far-right Rassemblement National (RN, formerly Front National — the party of Jean-Marie and Marine Le Pen and more recently Jordan Bardella) is often seen as quasi-inevitable. Yet left-wing municipal leaderships have often been able to hang on to power, and in some cases even gain ground. Municipal elections held across France on March 15 and 22 didn’t lead to the RN victory march that many pundits had predicted. Instead, they revealed more of a mixed bag: slow and steady advances for the far right but also signs that the Left is far from dead if it can continue to deliver locally.
A Firewall Against the Rassemblement National
The postindustrial north has been a key electoral focus for the RN. In the 2024 parliamentary elections, the Rassemblement National swept to a shocking victory in the district Méricourt is part of, winning handily by thirteen points over the PCF candidate.
This year in Méricourt, the traditional right didn’t front a candidate, which paved the way for the two-way horse race between the PCF’s Planque and the RN’s Laurent Dassonville, an opposition councilman and parliamentary assistant to Bruno Bilde, one of Marine Le Pen’s close advisors. Many worried the combination of factors could spell the end of a century of Communist rule, but in the end the hollowed-out center wasn’t enough for the RN, whose candidate lost by about seven hundred votes.
Similar results could be seen across the region. In Rouvroy, the PCF’s Valérie Cuvillier brought in 2,375 votes to the RN’s 1,316; in Rœulx, the Communists won more than 70 percent of votes. Neighboring Avion and Lens were both held by the respective Communist and Socialist incumbents.
These trends track nationwide as well. Electoral lists headed up by the PCF won in thirty-seven municipalities across France, from the tiny Saint-Étienne-au-Mont in the north to Martigues in the south. In Nîmes, in the south of France, a Communist-led list staved off the RN’s Julien Sanchez, making the city the largest in France to be run by the PCF and the second-largest Communist municipality in Europe after Graz, Austria. The RN, for its part, won forty-seven cities and towns across France, including several in the former mining region of Nord-Pas-de-Calais, such as Liévin, Grenay, and Billy-Montigny, where the far-right candidate edged out the Communist contender by five hundred votes.
On a local scale, the Communists have proven to be an unexpected firewall in elections many observers predicted would shift sharply to Le Pen’s Rassemblement National. “The RN doesn’t actually control that many town halls. It has members of parliament, but that’s not the same thing,” explained Marion Fontaine, a political science professor at Sciences Po in Paris who has researched the role of football clubs as markers of working-class solidarity in northern France. “People split their votes. They don’t necessarily vote the same way at the national level as they do in municipal elections.”
This mirrors broader trends in the opposite direction. Since its heyday in the late 1940s, the PCF as a national party has slowly lost ground across France, but on a local level, many city councils and mayors have managed to retain power. It’s in the north, however, that the fear of inroads made by the RN is most acute. Here, deindustrialization, increased social atomization and the RN’s growing foothold have threatened even some of the PCF’s last remaining bastions.
For towns like Méricourt, the municipal elections were not just a referendum on who would serve as mayor for the next six years but a test to see whether long-developing national trends had indeed spilled over into local mayoral races. “In a town like this, politics is about the school, the sports hall, the streets people walk every day,” Planque, the newly elected mayor of Méricourt, told Jacobin over hearty plates of sausage and potatoes at the Le Petit Bossu. “This election isn’t just about changing a mayor but about what kind of town we want to be.”
Planque’s ultimately successful campaign highlighted outgoing Mayor Baude’s track record, including investments in cultural activities, popular education initiatives, and public housing projects. Dassonville, on the other hand, criticized the PCF for what he saw as overspending on cultural programs, high taxes, and insecurity. He suggested that if elected, he would have frozen the cultural budget in order to bring spending in line.
“The distinctive feature here is that everything is free,” Le Mazel, at the public library, said. “You come to the library, it’s free. You go see a film, it’s free. You go see a play, it’s free.” This, he says, is a direct legacy of the party’s strategy: “The PCF isn’t just a political party but an entire galaxy of cultural and social organizations.”
Investing in culture, health care, education, and housing has shown to be effective in the face of the far right. “These mayors have succeeded by investing in very traditional areas, particularly community and associational life,” Fontaine, at Sciences Po, said. “They’ve managed to maintain a traditional municipal ethos while still speaking both to their old base and to newer segments of the electorate.”
Still, the Left’s strategy hasn’t always worked. In some cases, like in neighboring Hénin-Beaumont (about six miles from Méricourt), catastrophic municipal management and clientelism opened the door for the far right. In 2014, Le Pen–backed candidate Steeve Briois was elected mayor of Hénin-Beaumont, taking over for the disgraced Socialist incumbent Gérard Dalongeville, who later served a prison sentence of four years for embezzlement. In office, Briois has chipped away at cultural budgets and pushed some civic actors to abandon the city — all the while installing CCTV cameras and reinvesting money into municipal police.
In Hénin-Beaumont, Le Mazel explained, a theater space known for its unique — and sometimes boundary-pushing — performances was forced out, replaced with tributes to French variety singers and pop culture icons like actress Brigitte Bardot. “They say, ‘Oh, we’ve done away with all of the bohemian, woke, elitist culture aimed at well-to-do yuppies. Now, it’s culture for the people,’” Le Mazel explained. Increasingly, he feared, the message was working even in traditional left-wing strongholds like Méricourt.
The Silent Rassemblement National Vote
In its campaign to conquer the north, the RN has looked instead to capitalize on demographic shifts and a fractured social fabric. “The last mines closed in 1986,” Fontaine, at Sciences Po, noted. “That means that today we’re now in a situation where the shutting down of the mines dates back forty years. The populations that vote today are only marginally people who have a direct link to mining.” “It’s not as though Communist miners suddenly have decided to vote for the far right,” she added.
Northern France, she explained, experienced a first wave of deindustrialization in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, as longstanding mining activities were outsourced and closed down. A second wave hit in the 1990s and 2000s when the heavy industries that had been brought in to replace the mines also dried up, forcing local governments to “manage deindustrialization” for a second time. With the flight of industry, new populations moved in while the older working-class ones left. The new residents were less tied to the civic structures put in place by decades, and in some cases more than a century, of Communist rule and to the particular working-class mining identity of the region.
“People feel abandoned,” Planque said. “When the factories close, when services disappear, people look for someone who says they have simple answers.”
Like on the national stage, the RN’s discourse has instead focused on public security and policing. This appears to be creeping into Méricourt too. At a commemoration for the Méricourt citizens who had fought in the Algerian War, talk quickly shifted to insecurity. One resident explained that he had had his car broken into three times. National politics weighed heavily over the conversation that followed, with the leader of the left-wing party La France Insoumise, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, bearing the brunt of the criticism.
To Le Mazel, an “accumulation of factors,” including the twenty-four-hour news cycle, divisions on the Left, and the changing face of Le Pen’s party had chipped away at left-wing dominance in northern France. Overall, public opinion has shifted drastically in favor of the far right, with as much as 42 percent of French voters saying they would view an RN victory “favorably” in a local race. But in towns like Méricourt, the RN remains largely invisible, he said. “I’ve worked here for over ten years. I see hundreds of people pass through . . . and the RN candidates, I’ve never seen them,” he said.
As for the 40 percent of Méricourt citizens who voted RN, he imagined the same: “The people who really carry the RN’s message are often outside local structures,” he said. “When you’re struggling to make ends meet and you see your neighbor who’s receiving unemployment, some people start to think, ‘It’s not normal that he’s living like that.’ That gives rise to resentments and misconceptions that the far right then exploits.”
The decoupling of national and local voting habits in places like Méricourt, Fontaine added, is part of a broader trend across much of northern France. “In the mining basin, there’s a paradoxical dynamic at play between the assertion of an identity, which is often reinvented or mythologized, and a sense of humiliation and marginalization at the national level,” she said. “If a sense of pride prevails, left-wing mayors can hold on. If a sense of humiliation dominates, it’s the RN that tends to benefit.”
The 2027 presidential election offers the next big test of this theory.