The metro doors open to the City Hall station, and the mayoral candidate walks out onto the platform. The candidate turns around and winks at the camera before walking out of frame. The slogan “A happy city” appears in blocky, retro, red-and-yellow lettering.

This might sound like one of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s campaign ads. But it’s actually a spot for Sarah Knafo, a far-right politician currently trying to become the next mayor of Paris.

Knafo is a member of the radical right political party Reconquête, founded by polemicist Eric Zemmour, a former presidential candidate convicted multiple times for hate speech. Knafo cuts a different figure from Zemmour. Like Mamdani, she’s young—just 32. Like Mamdani, she’s trying to project an image of optimism during tough times. And like Mamdani, she’s campaigning on a host of quality-of-life issues such as the high cost of housing.

But the similarities end there. Mamdani campaigned to keep policing numbers flat; Knafo wants to drastically increase the number of armed police on the streets of Paris. Mamdani pushed for a rent freeze and more public housing; Knafo wants to auction off public housing to private buyers and end rent controls. Mamdani is trying to curb the influence of cars in New York City; Knafo wants to roll back the pedestrianization of much of Paris. She’s also promised to lower taxes, add more free parking spaces, and take a chain saw to the city budget, reducing it by €125 million per year through cuts to municipal staffing, environmental projects, and flagship cultural initiatives such as the “swimming in the Seine” project—a legacy of the 2024 Paris Olympics.

And, while Mamdani takes pride in his immigrant background, Knafo says, “Mass immigration did not create our problems, but it makes almost all of them worse.” She has also cultivated close ties to the MAGA movement in the United States.

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Yet, despite her radical approach, Knafo is a genuine player in the mayoral race. She’s currently polling at 13.5 percent, making her one of five candidates who appear poised to notch the 10 percent vote share necessary to advance to the second round in the closely watched election—a rare situation the French call a “quinquangulaire.” Knafo trails Parti Socialiste (PS) candidate Emmanuel Grégoire and conservative Les Républicains candidate Rachida Dati. But she is polling above Sophia Chikirou, the candidate for the far-left La France Insoumise (LFI), and Pierre-Yves Bournazel, a centrist in the Emmanuel Macron mold.

While experts agree that Knafo’s chances of winning the mayoral race in Paris are slim, her rise confirms a significant shift of French society toward the far right, which could find itself in the role of kingmaker in some second-round ballot scenarios, both this year and in next year’s crucial presidential election. Knafo has drawn support from bourgeois neighborhoods in western Paris, where older, wealthier residents have been seduced by her direct communication style. “A lot of former center-right voters are actually quite sympathetic to the far right, and indeed some of them have defected,” Victor Mallet, a Financial Times journalist and author of the recent book Far-Right France: Le Pen, Bardella and the Future of Europe, said in an interview.

Knafo is also benefiting from the fact that Marine Le Pen’s far-right Rassemblement National (RN) has not made the Parisian elections a top priority. The RN is concentrating its efforts on winning elections in several other cities, including Toulon, Nice, and even Marseille.

The RN’s Paris candidate, Thierry Mariani, has kept a low profile, explained Ugo Palheta, a French sociologist and author of the 2024 book Far Right: The Resistible Rise. Knafo has done the opposite. “They’re trying to get their piece of the pie, so they’ve run an aggressive, militant campaign,” he said of Knafo’s team. “By combining libertarian, anti-redistribution, and anti-tax themes with subliminal xenophobic and racist tropes, they’ve been able to resonate with a segment of the electorate that has historically been rooted on the right.” (A spokesperson for Knafo attributed the candidate’s success to a “well-developed, complete and data-backed program,” as well as a “super innovative, colorful, digital campaign that is unusual in politics.” “Mamdani and [Knafo] are fundamentally opposed politically, but just because he is innovative does not mean we should refuse to be,” the spokesperson said, adding that Knafo saw herself as “equidistant between Les Républicains [traditional right]and the Rassemblement National [far right]”—and not on the far right.)

Knafo has also harked back to her roots in an effort to appeal to young people and working-class voters. The granddaughter of Moroccan and Algerian Sephardic Jews, Knafo grew up in Les Pavillons-sous-Bois, a working-class commuter suburb in Seine-Saint-Denis. She attended high school in Paris and, at the age of 28, formally joined Zemmour’s 2022 presidential campaign as an adviser (it was later revealed that she was also dating Zemmour). On the campaign trail, she regularly invokes themes of insecurity—speaking, for example, about how, as a child, her mother wouldn’t allow her to take the bus on her own. She’s readapted these themes in the lead-up to the mayoral election, promising to eliminate dangerous “no-go zones” and “reconquer neighborhoods where authority is weak.” “Parisians deserve a safe capital, without lawless zones,” she told political commentator Alain Duhamel on BFMTV in February.

Knafo’s Gen-Z-coded digital presence has been aided by wall-to-wall cable news coverage, with Knafo making repeated TV appearances on major stations including TF1, France Inter, and BFMTV. Her press appearances are carefully curated to convey a gently bourgeois charisma, with the candidate wearing pantsuits and often walking through the streets of Paris in a bright yellow jacket.

She’s also pushed her campaign out on social media. On X, Knafo’s videos were viewed more than 17 million times in January—an engagement three times its organic reach on account of the site’s favorable algorithm, according to a study from the research institute Arago. And in February, her campaign announced that Laure  Cohen, a singer better known by the stage name of Koxie and famous for the hit mid-2000s song “Garçon,” had joined her team. Koxie has presented herself as “apolitical”—more interested in daily issues like parking than ideological ones. (Nonetheless, Koxie has gotten in trouble for past comments of a political nature, including saying that “a woman should be a bit submissive” in order to “hold down a man.”)

Knafo’s charm offensive worked on retiree Albert Dulac, who lives in Savoie, in eastern France. Knafo is the type of politician who “could set the country back on track,” Albert wrote in a message on WhatsApp. “She speaks frankly, she’s brilliant, intelligent, feminine, natural, cultured,” he said. “She will have a great career—she’s irreproachable.”

Kelly, the owner of a children’s clothing store in Paris’s upscale 16th arrondissement, told The Nation that Knafo was “making a fair amount of noise” in the area. “She’s the only one who talks about high taxes [on shopkeepers],” the 46-year-old, who has lived in the neighborhood for half of her life, said.

But Kelly was not convinced that Knafo would be able to make good on her promises if she won. “Even if she truly thinks she will be able to [lower taxes], she won’t be able to. What is she going to remove? VAT?” she said.

Other residents of the neighborhood, located just across the Seine River from the Eiffel Tower, expressed their dismay at the leadership of Socialist Party Mayor Anne Hidalgo without necessarily offering up their vote to Knafo.

Hidalgo, 66, was first elected in 2014 and reelected in 2020. While she has been able to achieve several transformative projects, including the creation of an estimated 1,000 kilometers of protected cycle lanes, a revitalization of Paris’s social housing stock, and a successful 2024 summer Olympics, she remains widely unpopular. Smoking a cigarette on the terrace of a local bar, undecided voter Mélanie said that Hidalgo had “given Paris a bad image.”

“She sort of destroyed small businesses; she did construction projects that weren’t justified,” Mélanie said. “I don’t even understand why she was reelected in the first place.” 

PS candidate Grégoire and his allies have nonetheless tried to defend Hidalgo’s record—in the face of attacks from Knafo and Dati, the candidate of the traditional right. “We have pursued progressive policies in terms of housing and environmental issues. The risk is that all these policies could be called into question by a coalition of the right and the far right,” Ian Brossat, a senator from the Parti Communiste Français (PCF) who served as Paris’s deputy mayor in charge of housing, emergency shelter, and the protection of refugees under Hidalgo, told The Nation.

Brossat is one of the members of the PS-led electoral list known as the Union de la Gauche et des Écologistes—a broad left-wing coalition that, in addition to the PS and the Écologistess, also includes smaller parties like the PCF, Place Publique, L’Après, and the Gauche Républicaine et Socialiste.

Unlike in past mayoral elections, where France’s various left-wing parties ran their own candidates in the first round of the two-round system before either fusing lists with the front-runner or dropping out in favor of better-placed adversaries, this year a wide swath of the left decided to join forces ahead of the first round in the face of the threat from the far right, Brossat explained. The coalition “allows us to maximize our chances of victory and to come out ahead in the first round,” he said.

Notably absent from the union is La France Insoumise, the left-wing party founded by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, which is currently caught up in multiple political scandals related to the death of a far-right activist in Lyon and Mélenchon’s comments about Jeffrey Epstein. LFI’s candidate, Chikirou, is currently polling just over 10 percent.

At a Grégoire rally, Lucie Castets, a French civil servant whose name was floated as a left-wing prime minister candidate after the country’s 2024 snap legislative elections, told The Nation that the decision whether or not to join forces with LFI was “a discussion we’ll only have in the second round, if we even need to have it.” “I think La France Insoumise will get less than 10 percent, and so there will be a massive transfer of votes from La France Insoumise to the united left list,” Castets, who is also running in an election in the 12th arrondissement in the east of Paris, predicted.

Despite favorable polling that casts Grégoire as the candidate to beat, Castets cautioned against complacency on the part of the left. “As far as Paris is concerned, we have a very important role to play in showing that the left knows how to govern to improve people’s lives, and that it knows how to stand up to the right and the far right,” she said. “It’s very important that the city stays in left-wing hands, and that’s why we’re fighting.”

After 24 years of the left in power, Brossat, of the PCF, worried that a combination of changes to the two-round voting system that will take effect for the first time this year and low voter turnout could also lead to a situation wherein the left manages to win individual arrondissements, but loses City Hall. “If turnout in the 16th arrondissement is 10 points higher than in the 18th, we will lose,” Brossat explained. “We’ll keep our arrondissement, but we’ll lose the Paris City Hall. In reality, a left-wing arrondissement—if it can’t rely on a left-wing Paris City Hall—can’t accomplish much.”

Meanwhile, on the right, Knafo has not ruled out offering an olive branch to Dati, running on the Républicains ticket—though Dati doesn’t appear to be ready to return the favor. In fact, sociologist Palheta ventured, Knafo’s “strategy from the start has been the union of the right.” “Even in a subordinate position, I think she sees herself fitting in well in a majority led by Rachida Dati.”

Whatever the case, by this time next week, we will know just how successful Knafo has been—and just how nervous the left should be about the far right’s strength in the nation’s capital.