Nicolas Sarkozy is braced for his last political test before next year's bruising presidential race in local elections this weekend which are expected to expose France's disillusionment with its ruling class.

Half of France will vote on Sunday 27 March to appoint about 2,000 local councillors in cantons, the smallest segment in France's labyrinthine local administration. But the first-round vote todaywas expected to show abstention hitting record levels of over 50%. By 5pm, there had been a turn-out of only 36%, low for a local vote.

One year before the presidential vote, local representatives of Sarkozy's ruling rightwing UMP party are so fearful of a backlash against Sarkozy that many have left the party logo off election material and beseeched party leaders not to canvas on their behalf. At one meeting last week in Le Raincy, a rightwing town surrounded by the highrise ghettos that saw France's worst riots in 2005, the higher education minister, Valérie Pécresse, tried to rally the troops by quoting Winston Churchill. She blamed the financial crisis for the nation's pessimism, arguing that Sarkozy was still the best hope for the 2012 presidential race. "When a country goes through a storm it needs a captain to step up to the bridge," she said.

Imploring candidates to remind voters that Sarkozy had succeeded in changing France, she cited only three reforms, the raising of the pension age, an overhaul of universities and compulsory minimum service on public transport on strike days, which means France can no longer be paralysed by industrial action.

The Socialist party hopes to distract attention from its own infighting over who it will choose as presidential candidate and capitalise on the mood against Sarkozy. Before the military invention against Libya, the president was festering at his lowest approval ratings, 29%, with two polls showing him knocked out of the first-round presidential race by the extreme-right National Front.

The left, which trounced the UMP in regional elections last year, holds 58 of the department councils up for election and wants to push above 60. The right holds 42 councils and could lose 12, including La Sarthe, the rural fiefdom of the prime minister, François Fillon. The much-reduced Communist party is battling to hold on to the last of the "red" working-class suburbs of Paris, Val-de-Marne, in the east.

The vote is the first electoral test for the new National Front leader, Marine Le Pen. Seven out of 12 polls in 11 days showed her getting through to the final round of the presidential race. But the "cantonales" elections have never been easy ground for the party, which has no councillors at this level. The party is keen to make ground in the old mining communities of Pas-de-Calais, where Le Pen made her name.

However it is Le Pen's rhetoric against immigration and the "Islamification" of France that has dominated public debate and set the tone for Sarkozy's UMP party, which has organised a debate on Islam and secularism for 5 April. When the new interior minister and former Sarkozy adviser Claude Guéant said last week that "French people no longer feel at home in France", he was lampooned by the left for veering on to extreme rightwing territory.

If the left does well in the local elections, it could affect the French senate and cause another headache for Sarkozy. Half the senatorial seats are up for renewal in September, voted for by local representatives. A surge for the left at local level could make it hard for the right to keep hold of the senate, causing difficulties for Sarkozy in the final months of his term.