Abstract
With 66.5% participation at the first round of the French municipal elections last month, we notice that the number of voters has slightly diminished since the last municipal elections that took place in 2001 (67.4%) and that those figures come within the scope of the continuous diminution of participation in this type of elections since 1983 (78.3%) and the overall decline of participation in all polls. We can associate the significant rise of these levels of abstention with the beginning of the ?political crisis' at the end of the 1980s, even though the first signs of the abandoning of the polling stations appeared during the presidential elections of 1981.
