Between Gérard Larcher and Emmanuel Macron, a permanent balance of power

2023-10-02 13:00:13
Emmanuel Macron and Gérard Larcher, during a ceremony at the Luxembourg Gardens, in Paris, May 10, 2022. CHRISTIAN HARTMANN / AFP

He will run again for a fifth three-year term. Eight days after the senatorial elections, the President of the Senate, Gérard Larcher, must be re-elected without difficulty at the helm of the Palais du Luxembourg, Monday October 2, shortly after 3 p.m. And thus retain the plateau that he has held since 2014, after having already occupied it from 2008 to 2011. A sort of obvious fact, in an institution where stability is made a cardinal value.

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For the sake of form, the president of the socialist group, Patrick Kanner, will present himself, as well as the communist leaders, Cécile Cukierman, and environmentalist, Guillaume Gontard. But as in every election, the 74-year-old Les Républicains (LR) senator from Yvelines will gather votes beyond his own political family, as his ability to maneuver between the nine groups and find a point of balance is recognized by all. “He brought the Senate into existence without denying his convictions, he never broke off dialogue with anyone, he keeps the institution alive”, greets the LR president of the law committee, François-Noël Buffet. The former socialist senator from Loiret, Jean-Pierre Sueur, who did not run for re-election in 2023, praises his “way of taking care of everyone”which is worth to the former mayor of Rambouillet “good relations with all groups”.

With the President of the Republic, Emmanuel Macron, on the other hand, the relationship is more chaotic. There « cohabitation » between the first personage of the State and the second, despite the marks of republican courtesy, is nothing like a long quiet river. Since 2017, Mr. Larcher has shown a touch of condescension towards this young techno president, who certainly visited him the day before his inauguration at the Elysée, but has never held a single elective mandate and has already displayed the first days a Jupiterian conception of its function, paying little attention to the intermediary bodies and Parliament.

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“I explained to him how things work between the President of the Republic and the President of the Senate”boasts in front of the LR senators, the day after a first meeting at the Elysée, the one who has already had to deal, on set, with Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande. “We went to Versailles to listen to the good word”he mocks in front of the same people, in July 2018, the day after the Versailles Congress. “The president invited me to a little tea party”, quips the septuagenarian once again, infantilizing the head of state. Basically, the one who wants to be in Paris “the voice of rurality”, on the strength of his two trips per week to the departments, criticizes Mr. Macron for a tax policy to the detriment of local authorities. And sees in the abolition of the housing tax, decided in 2017, “a quasi-constitutional fault”.

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