Will Lyon's left-wing and Green coalition manage to keep control of its City Hall? Incumbent Green mayor Grégory Doucet's re-election campaign has run into serious difficulty against Jean-Michel Aulas, an independent candidate allied with the right-wing and centrist blocs. Aulas, a businessman and the former president of the local Olympique Lyonnais (OL) football club, has been leading by a significant margin in the polls.
The duel, a polarized race between candidates with two opposing visions of society, has tended to overshadow the other four candidates, who have, at this stage, polled anywhere between 4% and 10% of first-round voting intentions.
Doucet has received endorsements from the parties that comprise his incumbent majority, but he has struggled to assert himself in the face of Aulas's fame. More broadly, the left seems fragmented ahead of the first round, with MP Anaïs Belouassa-Chérifi as the candidate for the radical La France Insoumise (LFI) party, former deputy mayor for cultural affairs Nathalie Perrin-Gilbert running as an independent with backing from the center-left Parti Radical de Gauche (PRG), and Georges Képénékian, a former mayor of Lyon (from 2017 to 2018), also running as an independent. Meanwhile, Alexandre Dupalais is running for a party allied to the far-right Rassemblement National (RN), which could lead to RN members once again sitting on Lyon's city council.
