Do not say "cantonal" anymore, this name disappeared in 2015, when the general councils were renamed departmental councils.
That year, the right recovered many bastions passed to the left for the duration of a mandate, to hold 67. The left, for its part, lost about twenty, only to preside over 33.
The political forces present, before the departmental elections of June 20 and 27, 2021. LP / Infog
The republican right, in the majority
With 37 departmental councils, the Republicans are the first departmental political force.
On the evening of March 29, 2015, the UMP, the former name of LR, won or recovered 27 new departments.
“The republican right wins the departmental elections.
The left, too divided in the first round, is experiencing a sharp decline, ”admits Prime Minister Manuel Valls directly from Matignon.
The UDI gets nine, the various straight eighteen, the MoDem one.
In all, 67 departments out of 100 are acquired on the right, in the south-east, the Lyon region, the center, all around the Ile-de-France and in the east.
The left in retreat
On the evening of the second round, the Socialist Party won the Lozère, administered by the right since the post-war period.
But the victory is bitter: Ain, Charente, Cher, Creuse, Doubs, Drôme, Eure, Indre-et-Loire, Isère, Jura, Oise, North , the Pyrénées-Atlantiques, the Saône-et-Loire, the Seine-et-Marne, the Seine-Maritime, the Deux-Sèvres, the Somme, the Territoire de Belfort and Mayotte are lost on the left.
The PS only manages 24 departments, corresponding to the southwest quarter of France, to half of Brittany.
In the process, the PS also lost the presidency of the Association of departments of France.
The communist bastion of Val-de-Marne
Slowly, but surely, the Communist Party lost its departments one by one.
The defeat in the Allier, in 2015, left Val-de-Marne the only representative of the glorious electoral past of the PCF.
Christian Favier has chaired it since 2001. With 28 seats out of 50, he won the election once again, at the head of a left-wing coalition.
Leaving bonus?
No doubt, because during the municipal elections of 2020, the highly symbolic towns of Champigny-sur-Marne, that of Georges Marchais, Choisy-le-Roi and Valenton have passed to the right.
The Greens, in 2020
After the recompositions of the left and the right caused by the election of Emmanuel Macron in 2017, the municipal authorities saw the rise of environmentalists in local executives.
This is how they have chaired a department for a year: the Métropole de Lyon.
The entity has departmental status but its election took place at the same time as the municipal ones, in June 2020. This is where Bruno Bernard, long elected municipal in Villeurbanne, wavered Gérard Collomb, the former minister of Interior who had left the government to ensure re-election in his Lyon lands.
Unless he resigns, EELV is guaranteed to keep this department until 2026.
No department for the National Front
On the strength of her score in the European elections the previous year, Marine Le Pen is hoping for a lot of departmental in 2015. The National Front is hiring more than 7,600 candidates that year, more than three times the candidates running in 2011; they cover 79 departments. While she took the head of the family party for five years, and began the "demonization" of her party, the president nevertheless sees a growing number of controversies when FN candidates make racist, anti-Semitic, xenophobic remarks. Sixteen are excluded from its ranks. On the evening of the elections, in fact of the local anchoring targeted by the FN, 62 departmental councilors were elected, the FN obtained nowhere enough to manage a department or to form an alliance with the majority party.
