MPs are among the highest paid French people

2023-04-30 11:42:19

MPs are still at the top of the income scale. But they have experienced a slight dropout since the 2000s: they are now part of the 3% best paid French people, whereas they belonged to the most favored 1% twenty years ago, according to a study.

Deputies as senators receive a monthly allowance of 7,493 euros gross per month, aligned with the salary of very high officials of the Council of State. This remuneration allows “any citizen, whatever his social condition, to be able to exercise a mandate” and it is “the price of the independence and the dignity of the function”, underlines the site of the National Assembly.

Since its introduction in 1789, “the parliamentary indemnity has been the object of fierce and regular criticism”, recall the sociologist Étienne Ollion and the jurist Éric Buge in the latest issue of the journal Les Annales and in a note from the Institut of public policies published this week.

Both have estimated the amount of the “real allowance” of deputies since 1914, by deducting the expenses related to the mandate (parliamentary permanency, collaborators…). During the 20th century, this real level reached between three and five times the average worker’s wage.

And between 1945 and the end of the 1990s, the parliamentary allowance even placed deputies among the 1% of French people with the highest incomes.

Always more costs covered

In detail, the revaluations of the civil service point increased this remuneration until the 1960s. Then another mechanism was triggered: the Assembly gradually took charge of costs such as the remuneration of employees, travel and computer costs. This indirectly increased the real income of MPs.

But from the 2000s, this income experienced “a significant decline”, which pushed parliamentarians back from the rank of 1% to the rank of the 3% of the highest paid French people, calculated the authors of the study. Because the remuneration is then “linked to the index point (of the civil servants) only, without the possibility of additional support for their expenses”.

In addition, the non-cumulation of mandates since 2017 has limited other sources of income. The authors make the link with the evolution of the mandate of deputy itself, which resembles “less and less a liberal profession” and more and more “a status of salaried executive”. With similar unemployment insurance at the end of the mandate, a common law pension plan, as well as more demanding ethical rules.