2023-10-02 17:49:30
Gérard Larcher returns for a fifth term. The President of the Senate was re-elected this Monday at the helm of the upper house of parliament, during a secret ballot organized shortly after 3 p.m. in the hemicycle, eight days after the senatorial elections. He was reappointed with 218 votes out of 348 to the “plateau”, the seat of the president of the High Assembly which he occupied from 2008 to 2011 and since 2014.
At 74 years old, the senator from Yvelines did not really have to worry about the outcome of the vote. Designated as candidate on Wednesday by acclamation by his parliamentary group (The Republicans), by far the leading political force in the Senate, he also received last week the unanimous support of the centrist Union, another pillar of the senatorial majority.
This assured the former mayor of Rambouillet a comfortable majority in the vote which pitted him against Patrick Kanner, Guillaume Gontard and Cécile Cukiermann, respective leaders of the socialist, environmentalist and communist groups. Other minority groups, such as the RDSE (mainly radicals) or the Independents group, with a sensibility close to Édouard Philippe’s Horizons party, did not present a candidate.
In 2020, it was renewed very largely, with 231 votes out of 348, and the balance of power has not changed since, even if the right experienced a slight erosion during the senatorial elections of September 24, with a dozen seats lost , according to the latest estimates.
A personality that unites
The personality of Gérard Larcher, just re-elected in Yvelines for a sixth term as senator by winning four of the six seats in the department on his list, brings people together beyond his political family. “He embodies our institution. With him, we managed to raise the image of the Senate” in the face of a “hysterized” National Assembly, said the head of LR senators, Bruno Retailleau, on Public Senate on Monday.
“We fight him as we must fight him, but that in no way prevents his individual qualities,” recently estimated Patrick Kanner, president of the socialist group in the Senate. The absence of a majority from the presidential camp in the National Assembly since 2022 has only strengthened the role of Gérard Larcher, on whom the executive regularly tries to rely on to obtain compromises on legal texts.
In his project addressed to his fellow senators, the patriarch of the upper house intends to “legislate better, legislate less” during his new mandate, proposing a “real cure of normative austerity”. A fierce defender of territorial France, he also highlights among his priorities the need to “strengthen the presence of senators in the territories”, even if it means reducing the time spent in session at the Luxembourg Palace during certain so-called “control” weeks. In this project, he also promises that he will “return to the charge with the government” to make it reverse the law of non-cumulative mandates of 2014.
Third figure in the State, Gérard Larcher has also returned to the front line in recent years for having played the role of “counter-power” to which he is very attached through the Senate. The various commissions of inquiry (Benalla, consulting firms, Marianne funds, etc.) led by the upper house have had a significant impact in the public debate.
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