Outgoing Green mayor of Strasbourg Jeanne Barseghian, on the evening of her defeat after the second round of municipal elections, on March 22, 2026. FREDERICK FLORIN/AFP
The day after France's municipal elections, the mood within the Greens party was far from celebratory. While the party managed to retain the cities of Lyon, Grenoble and Tours and secure new victories in the Paris region towns of Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, Villepinte and Bagnolet, it also lost six cities it had taken in 2020: Bordeaux, Strasbourg, Besançon, Poitiers, Annecy and Colombes. Not to mention the Lyon metropolitan area, which shifted to the right – a situation that will complicate matters for Lyon's Green mayor, Grégory Doucet, who was re-elected. Bègles, a Bordeaux suburb where historic Green figure Noël Mamère served as mayor from 1989 to 2017 and which had since remained under the party's control, was taken by an independent candidate.
Admittedly, the 2020 municipal elections had been an unprecedented success for the Greens. Until then, the party had only governed two large cities: The eastern Paris suburb of Montreuil, from 2008 to 2014, and Grenoble, at the foot of the French Alps, since 2014. Then, in 2020, following a wave of mass climate protest marches, they managed to conquer eight new cities and secure the Lyon metropolitan area, in a context of record abstention rates due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
