2023-07-22 11:50:00
In one year, a rain of sanctions fell on the Assembly. The most undisciplined, well ahead of the other parties, are the LFI deputies.
By Hugo Romani for Le Point LFI and Louis Boyard were the most punished by the National Assembly. © Le Parisien / Arnaud Journois / MAXPPP / PHOTOPQR/LE PARISIEN/MAXPPP Published on 07/22/2023 at 11:50 a.m.
This sixteenth legislature is definitely unlike any other. With very different profiles of deputies, a massive entry of elected representatives from the far right, as well as from the far left, the absence of a majority but also an explosion… of disciplinary sanctions. As a reminder, the regulations of the National Assembly provide for the sanctioning of deputies provoking “a tumultuous scene”, “calling for violence in public session” or even insulting their colleagues or members of the government. They can range from a call to order to temporary exclusion (for two months).
The world tells us that this 2022-2023 session was a particularly rich year in sanctions, with 85 decisions pronounced. The previous record dated back to 2022 and it was… 8! However, the emergence of sanctions should be analyzed as a recent phenomenon. If we exclude this particularly rich year, there have been as many sanctions imposed since Emmanuel Macron came to power (24) as between 1958 and 2017. Is this the result of disciplinary inflation or growing indiscipline on the part of deputies?
LFI sanctions champion
Probably a bit of both. To listen to the historian Jean Garrigues, verbal virulence is not new in politics. For example, in 1967, Gaston Defferre provoked his colleague René Ribière, calling him a “moron”, a confabulation that was settled… by a sword duel. Fifty-six years later, the swords have disappeared but not the invectives, as evidenced by Olivier Rozenberg, researcher at Sciences Po, for whom “the explosion of sanctions […] results, in part, from the increase in verbal tensions which is due both to the record number of elected members from the extremes and the refusal of some to play the codified club game of the parliamentary institution”.
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In this game, the undisputed winners remain the elected representatives of La France insoumise, who received almost all of the sanctions in 2023. On March 16, an LFI deputy Matthias Tavel received a call to order for a “Shut up, you up there! », Addressed to one of his counterparts from the National Rally. The extreme right is, for its part, only very little sanctioned compared to the Insoumis: four sanctions pronounced, including the exclusion of Grégoire de Fournas after the controversy over his remarks addressed to Carlos Martens Bilongo.
If these punishments fall above all against the opposition, elected representatives of the majority can also be called to order, such as the macronist Pascale Fontenel-Personne for her “confusion between the exercise of his parliamentary mandate and the interests of his company”. But it is, however, much rarer, because as Jean Garrigues explains, “it is complicated to sanction one’s side”. At the end of July 2022, François Ruffin had also complained of seeing a deputy of the majority only called to order for a Nazi salute (done, according to the latter, to stigmatize an elected official of the RN), when he was financially sanctioned for having worn a football shirt at the Palais-Bourbon.
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