2026 Municipal Elections: The Constitutional Council validates the new voting method in Paris, Lyon and Marseille

The Constitutional Council on Thursday approved a new voting system for municipal elections in Paris, Lyon, and Marseille, in which councilors from central town halls will now be directly elected, in addition to representatives from districts and sectors.

The "Sages" noted that for these three municipalities, the most populated in France, the legislator was justified in wanting to "improve the representation of the various political sensitivities within (their) deliberative assemblies", "in accordance with the objective of the constitutional value of pluralism of schools of thought and opinions".

The reform, led by Paris Renaissance MP Sylvain Maillard and supported by the government, was passed by the Assembly at the beginning of July despite hostility from the Senate.

It must be applied from the municipal elections of March 2026, leading to a double election system, and therefore two ballot boxes, one to elect the members of the Central Town Hall Council (Paris Council, Municipal Councils of Lyon and Marseille) - who then elect the mayor -, the other to elect those of the district (in Paris) or the sector (in Lyon and Marseille).

In Lyon, the reform involves the organization of a triple ballot, since the citizens of the municipalities of the Lyon Metropolitan Area already vote directly for their metropolitan representatives, at the same time as for their municipal councilors. In particular, the Constitutional Council, which was asked to consider this point, considered that "the new rules introduced are not particularly complex."

The reform puts an end to the voting system introduced by the "PLM law" in 1982: voters in Paris, Lyon and Marseille previously voted in each district or sector for a list of councillors, with the elected representatives at the top of the list sitting on both the district/sector council and the central town hall council.

But the list that came out on top in each district/sector benefited from a majority bonus of 50%, giving the Paris Council and the municipal councils of Lyon and Marseille a morphology that was sometimes far removed from the results at the municipal level: in 1983, the socialist Gaston Defferre - the inspiration behind the law - was re-elected mayor of the Phocaean city thanks to a majority of left-wing municipal councillors, although his lists won fewer votes across the city than those of the right.

This system of election by district - sometimes compared to that of the American presidential election with electors in each state - had led the promoters of the reform to denounce these mathematical subtleties, in that they constituted, according to them, a "democratic anomaly".