The 79,000 voters are called to the polls this Sunday, September 24, for the senatorial indirect ballot. The suspense is not very present: renewed by half, the upper house should renew a majority of elected officials from the right and the center, the majority leaving rather in dispersed order. The National Rally will target one or more seats; as for the left, it will aim to increase its contingent of elected officials.
Less than eight months before the next major European electoral meeting, 170 of the 348 senatorial seats are to be filled for six years in around forty departments, from Landes to Pas-de-Calais via Paris, the Island from France or Mayotte. The other 178 will be in 2026.
Polling stations, located mostly in prefectures, open at 8:30 a.m. in mainland France, but the election has already started overnight in New Caledonia, where two positions are at stake.
Two voting methods coexist for these senatorial elections with a discreet campaign: in the departments where one or two senators are elected, the election takes place by majority vote in two rounds (one round in the morning, the other in the afternoon) , and in the other departments, it takes place by proportional list voting in one round.
At the Palais du Luxembourg, seat of the Chamber of Territories, the political parties will, however, have their eyes glued to the results, once the polling stations close (5:30 p.m.), to count their numbers.
The right maintained? The presidential majority in difficulty? The left making slight progress? An incursion by the National Rally? White cabbage for the Rebels? Fine connoisseurs of the electoral map make each of their predictions there.
Everyone agrees on one point: the forces present will only move at the margins, at the dawn of heated parliamentary debates on immigration and the budget.
“There will perhaps be some rebalancing, but still a lot of stability,” assures Hervé Marseille, president of the centrist Union, a group allied with the Republicans (LR) in the senatorial majority.
The right is moving forward without pressure, in the wake of its leader Gérard Larcher (74), in the running for a sixth term as senator in Yvelines, before a more than likely confirmation as president of the Senate on October 2 .
“In the difficult and unstable political times that we are experiencing, stability is already a great victory,” notes Bruno Retailleau, the boss of the LR group, currently credited with 145 senators out of 348 in total.
In a hemicycle still attached to the traditional left-right divide, a reflection of the municipal elections, the Socialist Party (PS) intends to remain the second group in the Senate (64 senators currently).
“Symbolically, it’s important,” recognizes the socialist leader – and candidate in the North – Patrick Kanner, satisfied with having signed “a win-win agreement” with the communists and ecologists in around fifteen departments. With an underlying ambition: to reach 100 left-wing senators in the hemicycle, compared to 91 before this renewal. Among the likely newcomers, former presidential candidate Yannick Jadot.
This alliance did not please La France insoumise (LFI), dismissed for lack of sufficient local coverage to fill the ranks of the Senate. LFI responded by applying, without much hope, throughout France, sometimes using the logo of the Nupes coalition to the regret of the PS and Europe Écologie-Les Verts (EELV).
A minority and dispersed among several groups in the Senate, the presidential majority also risks paying the limits of its local roots. “The last municipal elections took away all hope of substantial gain,” concedes a disillusioned Renaissance senator. Results on which the President of the Republic should not dwell in his interview with TF1 and France 2 Sunday evening.
Édouard Philippe’s Horizons party seems, for its part, more dashing after its municipal victories in Reims or Angers, synonymous with almost won seats. “We continue to weave our web in the Senate,” slips Pierre-Yves Bournazel, head of the elections department at Horizons.
Finally, the National Rally, absent in the Senate, hopes to create a surprise in the Nord, Pas-de-Calais or Moselle.
So many issues for an upper house that has returned to the forefront of the media scene in recent months with notable commissions of inquiry (Benalla, Marianne Fund, etc.), and which praises the seriousness of its debates in the face of the tumult of the Assembly.
