As French voters head to the polls for municipal elections, would-be mayors are presenting their programmes for the next six years. Yet with multiple pressures weighing on these local representatives, many step down before the end of their terms. Resignations among mayors are currently at an all-time high. We take a closer look in this edition of France in Focus.
According to a recent report by Cevipof, conflicts within the municipal council are the leading cause of French mayors' resignations.
Jean-Jacques Noël was mayor of the village of Cirey-lès-Bellevaux in Haute-Saône for 15 years, but he resigned in 2023 "due to a profound disagreement" with three town council members. He says the political climate is increasingly harsh and often polarised: "Before, the atmosphere was friendly in council meetings. Now, it's a fight. What we see at the national level – when they tear into each other in the National Assembly – is being replicated at the local level. It's awful."
The weariness of elected officials in rural areas
For Noël, it's a family tradition: his father, grandfather and great-great-grandfather were also mayors of Cirey. But over the generations, shops and public services have disappeared from the village centre. "The mayor used to chat with residents at the local bar; we'd tackle issues head-on and sort out problems. Today, there aren't really any places for people to gather in the villages anymore, and things just get blown out of proportion on social media." The former mayor laments the increasing lack of human interaction, which has been replaced by administrative tasks: "Mayors spend too much time on paperwork; we fill out tons of it. It's a bureaucratic nightmare, and the rules are always changing."
Prioritising health and family life
Helping an elderly person who's fallen in the middle of the night, cutting down a tree after a storm… Noël was always there for his constituents. "A mayor's workload is just huge. By resigning, I was looking out for my health. I'd already had a stroke in 2011; I didn't want to have a second one."
Sophie Rivens was the first female mayor of the village of Les Adrets in the Alps and, like Jean-Jacques, she juggled her mayoral duties with her job – a managerial position at a hospital, working nights. She resigned in 2022 just two years after she was elected, exhausted by the role: "I was missing out on so many family moments, and even when I was there, I was always preoccupied with some municipal issue. I felt like I was drifting away from my daughters' lives – that was unthinkable to me."
The mayor's allowance alone was not enough to allow her to quit her job and devote herself entirely to her municipal duties. But since December 2025, mayoral allowances have been increased thanks to a new law.
Among other things, it allows these allowances to be combined with maternity or paternity leave benefits. New legislation on the status of local elected officials was adopted on December 22, 2025.
Incivility and violence
Local representatives are on the front line, well within reach of angry citizens. As such, they are often subject to harassment and even violence. In 2024, 82 percent of attacks on elected officials were directed at mayors and councillors, compared to 13 percent directed at members of parliament and senators.
Jean-Claude Nevers was elected mayor of Montfleur in 2014, and in subsequent years he received threatening letters. In October 2022, he even discovered these words spray-painted in the town cemetery: "Nevers, you're going to die." Three vehicles belonging to council members were also set on fire. For the former mayor, the most traumatic event remains the fire at the town hall on the night of January 26, 2023. "There were two separate origins of the blaze, and we found an accelerating agent, used to make the fire as intense as possible. That's proof it was arson." Nevers did not resign immediately so as "not to give in to those who commit this kind of thing". A particularly brutal council meeting in late 2025 was the last straw. In December 2025, he submitted his resignation, which was accepted by the prefect in January 2026, two months before the end of his term.
In 2023, the shocking resignation of the mayor of Saint-Brevin-les-Pins following an arson attack on his home led to several measures: the creation of the Center for Analysis and Prevention of Attacks on Elected Officials (CALAE) along with certain protective measures. In 2024, a new law increased penalties for those who attack elected officials.
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