The results of the senatorial elections confirmed on Sunday the stability of the Upper House, dominated by the right and the center, and the difficulties of the Macronists, in an election marked by the return of the National Rally to the Palais du Luxembourg, with three elected officials.
“This senatorial renewal reinforces the senatorial majority of the right and the center,” rejoiced Gérard Larcher (LR), re-elected at 74 for a sixth term in Yvelines, before a more than probable reappointment to his position as president of the Senate on October 2.
“The Senate will continue to be this essential counter-power to democracy,” he added.
The Republicans still note a small erosion and are counting on a group of around 140 senators, compared to 145 previously, according to their latest estimates on Sunday evening. The rebalancing is favorable to the allied group of the centrist Union of Hervé Marseille, re-elected in Hauts-de-Seine, which hopes to “enrich” its troops and “reach sixty members”.
Eight months before the next major European electoral meeting, 170 of the 348 senatorial seats were to be filled for six years by indirect ballot in around forty departments.
The head of the LR group Bruno Retailleau castigated a “new failure of the President of the Republic” in the Senate, due to the “disconnection of macronism with the field”.
The Macronists have paid for their weak local roots, with a series of setbacks. From Sunday morning, they recorded an emblematic defeat, that of the Secretary of State for Citizenship Sonia Backès, the only minister in the running, beaten in the second round in New Caledonia by the separatist Robert Xowie.
Could this defeat lead Ms. Backès to leave the government, a rule hitherto applied by the President of the Republic for his ministers in the legislative elections? Neither the Élysée 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 that of Julien Bargeton in Paris nor Alain Richard (Val-d’Oise). The Macronists united within the RDPI group (24 elected officials) will see their troops diminish, even if their leader François Patriat assured that his group “will end up with more than 20 members” despite a vote where “everyone was against ( him)”.
Like Louis Vogel, elected in Seine-et-Marne, Édouard Philippe’s Horizons party seems more dashing, with a handful of additional elected officials brought to sit in the Independents group.
In a hemicycle still attached to the traditional left-right divide, a reflection of the municipal elections, the socialist group (PS and related) should remain the second force in the Senate by maintaining its base of 64 senators, according to its census Sunday evening before the latest expected results in the West Indies.
“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.
“I had set myself, with my communist and green colleagues, the bar of 100 senators (of the left), I believe that we will be close to it,” he said.
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 joins a slightly strengthened green group, with at least 15 members compared to 12 before the vote.
The communist group will also progress slightly: it announced that it had 17 senators compared to 15 before the election.
This left-wing alliance did not please rebellious France, dismissed for lack of sufficient local coverage to fill the ranks of the Senate. “The refusal of union around Nupes will have cost the left nearly 10 seats,” denounced LFI in a press release.
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 obtained three seats: Christopher Szczurek in Pas-de-Calais, Joshua Hochart in the North and Aymeric Durox in Seine-et-Marne.
“It’s a very big questioning, a sort of big wave which is constantly advancing,” reacted socialist Patrick Kanner.
09/25/2023 00:25:32 – Paris (AFP) – © 2023 AFP