In a vote marked by the return of the RN to the Palais du Luxembourg with three elected officials, the results of the senatorial elections confirmed on Sunday the stability of the Upper House, dominated by the right, and the difficulties of the Macronists.
“The senatorial majority” of the right and the center “will be reinforced,” rejoiced the head of senators LR Bruno Retailleau to AFP. “The LR group will remain the largest by a long, long way”, with “stability”, he underlined, confirming his candidacy for his own succession at the head of the group. Bruno Retailleau also denounced a “new failure of the President of the Republic” in the Senate, due to the “disconnection of Macronism with the field”.
The right was moving forward without pressure in the wake of its leader LR Gérard Larcher (74), re-elected for a sixth term in Yvelines before a more than likely confirmation as President of the Senate on October 2. LR expects to obtain “143 or 144 senators”, compared to 145 previously.
Less than eight months before the next major European electoral meeting, 170 of the 348 senatorial seats were to be filled for six years in around forty departments, from Landes to Pas-de-Calais via Paris, Ile- from France or Mayotte. The other 178 will be in 2026.
From Sunday morning, the macronie recorded an emblematic defeat, that of the Secretary of State for Citizenship Sonia Backès, the only minister in the running at the national level, beaten in the second round in New Caledonia by the separatist Robert Xowie.
Could this defeat lead Sonia Backès to leave the government, a rule hitherto applied by the President of the Republic for his ministers in the legislative elections? Neither the Elysée nor Matignon responded to AFP on this subject on Sunday.
Former minister Brigitte Bourguignon, already defeated in the 2022 legislative elections, was defeated in Pas-de-Calais. Among its executives in the Senate, Renaissance saved the seat of Xavier Iacovelli (Hauts-de-Seine), but not Julien Bargeton in Paris. Already reduced in numbers in the Senate, the Macronists united within the RDPI group (24 elected officials) are paying for their weak local roots, and risk seeing their troops diminish.
In Saint-Pierre and Miquelon, the former Minister of Overseas Affairs Annick Girardin was elected. Like Louis Vogel, elected in Seine-et-Marne, Édouard Philippe’s Horizons party seems more dashing after its municipal victories in Reims or Angers, synonymous with almost won seats.
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 – re-elected 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. The bet was won in the capital where this gathering sent eight of the twelve Parisian senators to the Luxembourg Palace, while the divided right obtained four seats.
The former environmentalist presidential candidate Yannick Jadot thus entered the Senate just like the communist Ian Brossat. This result marks “a historic victory for environmentalists in Paris”, told AFP Yannick Jadot, who sees in it the “rise in power of environmentalists in this territory”. Yannick Jadot should join a slightly strengthened green group, in particular by Mathilde Ollivier, elected senator for French people abroad, at only 29 years old, and who thus becomes the youngest member of the Senate.
“It’s important for my generation, the climate generation too, to be represented in institutions,” she responded to AFP. This left-wing alliance did not please rebellious France, dismissed for lack of sufficient local coverage to fill the ranks of the Senate.
Finally the National Rally, absent in the Senate since the departure of Stéphane Ravier at Reconquête, makes its return to the upper house. The far-right party announced it would obtain three seats: Christopher Szczurek in Pas-de-Calais, Joshua Hochart in the North and Aymeric Durox in Seine-et-Marne.
Having returned to the forefront of the media scene in recent months with notable commissions of inquiry (McKinsey Affair, Marianne Fund, etc.), the Upper House likes to emphasize the seriousness of its debates in the face of the tumult of the Assembly.
