The Socialist Emmanuel Grégoire was on track to be elected mayor of Paris on Sunday night, roundly beating the former rightwing minister Rachida Dati, early projections showed.

Grégoire, a Socialist MP with a long track record at city hall, was running for a united left including the Greens. He was projected to have won with about 53%. This would mark a clear win against Dati, who served in government under Emmanuel Macron and Nicolas Sarkozy and had sought to win the French capital for the right after 25 years governed by the left.

In France’s second city, Marseille, projections indicated that the mayor, Benoît Payan, had won with his leftwing coalition including the Socialists and the Greens – holding back a rise of the National Rally (RN), Marine Le Pen’s far-right anti-immigration party, in the city.

Elsewhere, the former prime minister Édouard Philippe is now expected to kickstart his centre-right candidacy for the French presidency next year after being re-elected as mayor of the northern port town of Le Havre.

Philippe was prime minister during Macron’s first term in office, including during the start of the Covid pandemic. He has been building up for more than a year to run for president in 2027, when Macron’s two terms as president come to an end and it is uncertain who will head Europe’s second-largest economy.

As the only presidential hopeful running in the municipal elections, Philippe won with more than 47% in a town he has run since 2010, and is now expected to use the win to accelerate his presidential campaign. But he faces other potential candidates on a crowded centre right, including the justice minister, Gérald Darmanin, and the former prime minister Gabriel Attal, who heads Macron’s centrist Renaissance party.

Philippe said in a speech at Le Havre town hall that he had learned lessons from the campaign in Le Havre, including that people had a “huge wish” for security and tranquility, social justice as well as “plain justice”. Philippe beat two other candidates, one on the united left, and one for the far right. “The people of Le Havre know that there is reason for hope when all people of good will come together in a discourse of truth and reject the extremes and its simplistic solutions,” said Philippe.

More than 1,500 cities and towns voted in the second round of local elections on Sunday, seen as a test of the political temperature before the presidential election.

Among the first towns to count their votes, the RN failed to win some of its key targets. Laure Lavalette, a close ally of Le Pen, did not win in Toulon, a historic naval city on the Mediterranean with a population of 180,000. Instead, the current traditional-right mayor held the city. In the south-eastern city of Nîmes, the RN’s Julien Sanchez failed to win. Instead, the communist Vincent Bouget, heading a union of the left, won the city, which had been run by the traditional right for 25 years. But as the count continued, the RN hoped to win the town of Carcassonne in the south-west, and several other towns.

The RN MP Laurent Jacobelli said that his party had nonetheless increased its local councillors across France, which he said marked a new era “which is the first step towards 2027”.

The party’s leader, Jordan Bardella, said the increase in local councillors was “historic”. He said: “Never has the RN and its allies had so many elected officials across France.” He said this marked a “dynamic in favour of our ideas”.

Crucially, a key ally of the far right won in Nice on the French Riviera – France’s fifth biggest city. Éric Ciotti, who quit as leader of the traditional right’s party, Les Républicains, and joined forces with Le Pen in 2024, won Nice from his bitter rival and one-time rightwing ally, Christian Estrosi. Ciotti’s new party, the Union of the Right for the Republic, could now increase its membership and will position itself to support a far-right presidential candidate next year.

The first results also showed some wins for the traditional right’s Les Républicains, including winning the traditionally Socialist stronghold of Clermont-Ferrand.

The Green mayor of Lyon, Grégory Doucet, was predicted to keep hold of the city, ahead of Jean-Michel Aulas, the former head of Olympique Lyonnais football club, who had run for the right.