Turnout: 44.66%
About this election
The 2020 French municipal elections chose the mayors and councillors of France's nearly 35,000 communes. Uniquely, they were split across more than three months by the COVID-19 pandemic: the first round went ahead on 15 March 2020, on the eve of the national lockdown, but the second round was postponed from March to 28 June 2020. The elections were marked by record abstention and by a striking "green wave", as ecologist lists captured a string of major cities.
French municipal elections use two systems depending on commune size. In communes of fewer than 1,000 inhabitants, councillors are elected by a simple two-round vote with panachage (voters may mix candidates). In communes of 1,000 or more, voting is by two-round closed list with a majority bonus: a list winning an absolute majority in the first round takes half the seats plus a proportional share of the rest; otherwise lists above 10% (with mergers possible for those above 5%) contest a run-off, where the winning list receives half the seats and the remainder are shared proportionally. The councils then elect the mayor.
The first round took place just as the coronavirus reached France; two days later the country entered a strict lockdown, and the scheduled second round was suspended. After fierce debate over public health and democratic legitimacy, the run-off was finally held on 28 June, more than three months later, in the roughly 5,000 communes where it was needed. The disruption produced the lowest turnout in the history of French municipal elections — about 44.66% in the first round and 41.86% in the second — with abstention worsened by fear of infection.
French municipal elections are dominated by local lists rather than national parties, and the largest single category in the communes of 1,000-plus was lists with no national label (around 25.9% of the first-round vote), followed by miscellaneous-right (17.5%) and miscellaneous-left (15.0%) lists. The national story, however, was the breakthrough of Europe Écologie Les Verts, often in alliance with the broader left: the Greens won Lyon, Bordeaux, Strasbourg, Besançon, Poitiers, Tours and Annecy, and took Marseille as part of a left coalition. The Socialists held Paris, where Anne Hidalgo was comfortably re-elected, and several other big cities. Les Républicains retained much of provincial France and many medium-sized towns, while Macron's La République En Marche, fielding few credible local lists, performed poorly. The Rassemblement National held Hénin-Beaumont and captured Perpignan, the first city of more than 100,000 people it had won.
The green wave reshaped the politics of France's largest cities for the six-year municipal term and gave the ecologist movement a powerful base of mayors and budgets ahead of the 2022 national elections. The record abstention, deepened by the pandemic, fed wider anxieties about civic disengagement that would resurface in the 2021 regional elections. For Macron's movement, the failure to put down local roots exposed a structural weakness of a party built around a national figure rather than a grassroots organisation.
Because municipal results are the sum of tens of thousands of local contests, dominated by independent and locally labelled lists, they do not aggregate into a meaningful single winner by region, and no regional choropleth is shown for this election. The defining geography of 2020 was instead urban: a belt of large cities — from Lyon and Grenoble to Bordeaux, Strasbourg and Marseille — turning to ecologist or left-green administrations, against a more conservative small-town and rural France.
Official results from the French Ministry of the Interior — interieur.gouv.fr. National figures refer to the first-round vote in communes of 1,000 or more inhabitants.
Compiled and reviewed by Bartłomiej Paruzel, Election Data Analyst, from official results. See our data methodology.