In 2022, La France Insoumise (LFI) saw its presidential candidate, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, claim second place in Paris with 30% of the vote, compared to 21.9% and third place nationwide. Then, as part of the Nouveau Front Populaire left-wing alliance in 2024, the radical movement secured four of the capital’s 18 constituencies, with all four directly elected in the first round of the snap parliamentary elections. Now, for the Paris mayoral election in March, LFI intends to capitalize on its previous strong electoral showings in the French capital.

“The only elections we haven’t really thrown ourselves into, where we haven’t really invested until now, were the municipal elections. It’s not right that our ideas aren’t represented at the local level, when so many things are decided locally!” said Sophia Chikirou, LFI’s candidate for mayor of Paris, in a January 19 interview on the YouTube channel of journalist Alexis Poulin, a former star presenter on the Russian state-linked media outlet RT France, which was shut down in 2022.

Until now, LFI had barely established any presence in Paris’s municipal political ecosystem. In its first municipal election campaign in 2020, the leftist movement, founded by Mélenchon in 2016, won 4.6% of the vote. Its lead candidate, Danielle Simonnet, was the only LFI member elected to Paris’s City Council. But she has since left LFI to co-found a political movement, L’Après, and has joined the left-wing unity list led by Socialist Emmanuel Grégoire for the March 2026 municipal elections.

You have 68.21% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.