France's municipal elections will reshape leadership in all of its 34,875 communes. While the final results won't be known until 22 March after the second round, we do already know that half the municipal councillors will be women, following recent changes to the law – but only a quarter of councils will be led by women.
For the first time, every municipality in France – from major cities to villages with just a few hundred residents – must present gender-balanced candidate lists, following a change in the law adopted in May last year.
The reform means that whichever parties come out on top next Sunday, around half of France’s 460,000 municipal councillors will be women.
“It’s a huge collective success that we’re building on parity and gender equality in politics in France,” says Julia Mouzon, founder of the Élues Locales ("Female local officials") network, which supports and promotes women running for local office.
“We have some of the most ambitious laws in the world regarding politics and gender and the place of women in politics,” she said, adding that it had been a long fight to get to this point, by both men and women.
After the groundwork laid in the 1980s under François Mitterrand's Socialist governments, gender quotas in local elections were first introduced in 2001 but initially applied only to towns with more than 3,500 inhabitants. In 2014, the threshold was lowered to 1,000 residents.
The law passed in May 2025 means that all communes, regardless of size, must present gender-balanced lists.
"It's a big change. We expect around 50,000 women to go into politics thanks to this law," Mouzon notes.
Recruiting candidates
It's a change in particular for the 25,000 French communes with fewer than 1,000 inhabitants. Just 37.6 percent of their councillors are female and, according to the Elues Locales network, 319 communes had no female councillors at all.
To encourage women to run, the non-profit association Elles Aussi ("them too") has been travelling across France organising meetings with prospective candidates.
“It’s really important that women take their share of responsibility – not just to help out or please people, but because it’s rewarding for you too,” Véronique Genelle, co-president of Elles Aussi, told attendees during a recent mentoring session in the village of Fresnes-lès-Montauban, a commune of about 600 residents in northern France.
Municipal councillor Delphine said she was running again, despite her experiences sitting on a 70 percent male council.
“When the village hall was renovated, I repeatedly asked to be part of the committee organising the works. I was never invited. The only time they asked me for my opinion was about the colour of the walls and the tiles," she told RFI.
Genelle says the new law was essential in helping to change such mentalities.
“We’re taking the place of men, and that isn’t easy,” she told RFI. "But the law requires it, and that’s a good thing because it’s helped raise awareness. Without the law pushing the issue, it would definitely have taken much longer [to achieve parity].”
Listen to a conversation about women in local elections in the Spotlight on France podcast
Persistent glass ceiling
While the law requires gender-balanced lists, it says nothing about the gender of who tops the list and would therefore become mayor.
Following the 2020 elections, just under 20 percent of mayoral seats were taken by women.
"It’s a nightmare," says feminist author and political journalist Léa Chamboncel, founder of the Popol podcast on women and politics.
"There's a glass ceiling. Basically, when women do access political mandates they often face the reality of misogyny, meaning that even though some of them might get elected, they don't often get real power, political power, strategic power."
Mouzon says these elections won't change much on the mayoral front, since only a quarter of the head of lists sent through to the prefectures were women. "It means three-quarters of French mayors will still be men."
"Most male politicians consider that women can't really be in charge, that they don't have the skills, whereas it's just not true," said Chamboncel. "And you see this kind of rhetoric in every type of institution."
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Obstacles to high office
Mouzon says progress on getting women into high office naturally takes time, given the 10,000 years of political life from which they were excluded.
But she also points to structural problems – town councillors are for the most part not paid and have to juggle their mandate with both professional and family obligations.
"Women are busier than men, taking care of children and their homes. So when asked to give some time to the city, to the nation, they think about it way more."
Political life itself can also deter potential candidates. Abuse in politics is directed at both women and men "but women will expose themselves more because the abuse is more insidious," Mouzon says, highlighting sexism, mansplaining, being ignored or less respected and online attacks.
"That's really something stopping women from entering politics, because they don't want to expose themselves or their families to this violence."
Another factor is the gendered distribution of responsibilities within councils, which Mouzon calls "qualitative parity".
"What we observe is that women generally are given responsibilities related to childcare, old people or social services, whereas men are given finance or urban planning,” she notes.
The latter areas tend to be more valued and as such are a stepping stone to high office.
Mouton says we need to aim for qualitative parity – not just in the sense that women should be in charge of urban planning and men childcare, but that "we see childcare in cities as just as important as urbanism".
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Expanding female networks
Paris has had a female mayor, Anne Hidalgo, since 2014, although she is not standing for re-election. The majority of France's big cities – which command higher salaries and provide more visibility for mayors – are, however, run by men.
"The more valued the job is, the more men and fewer women there are," Mouzon explains, adding that small towns with lower salaries for the post will have more female mayors.
There are also regional differences. For example, women are well represented in politics in western France "where the culture of equality is very present and it's normal for men and women to work together... even across political parties".
On the other hand, Elues Locales has noted less of an equality culture in the north and southeast of France. It's no coincidence that the far-right National Rally has made its biggest inroads in those parts of the country.
"When we do training sessions in the southeast and north of France, women really feel that they undergo discrimination but it's not a topic that can easily be discussed because the culture isn't there for them to assert themselves and talk about their experiences to men."
For Chamboncel, the far right's outward support of women's rights is skin deep.
"Far-right parties are pushing women, pretending to be progressive, pretending that having a woman, like Marine Le Pen, leading the [National Rally] party, or a woman leading a list, is a way of getting more women participating," she explains. "Yet when you really look at their programme, they're quite anti-feminist."
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She points to racism against women of colour, and neo-feminist groups associated with the far right such as Némésis which "use women's rights to elaborate on racism and say most rapes [are carried out] by foreigners".
Far-right mayors, she says, tend not to invest in women's organisations. "Some cities, like Perpignan, are cutting funding for women’s associations and organisations. So I don't think that things will get any better that soon, despite the bills and the quotas."
Mouzon, however, says that given that networking is often the key to success in politics, she is optimistic about the future for women in the field.
"I see this as a numbers-related issue – when we have 50 percent of women in politics, we'll have a sufficient number for each woman to be able to find mentors or friends in politics."
