In the Senate and at the UDI, Hervé Marseille navigates “skillfully” between the right and the government

by time news

A condemnation and a page that turns to the Union of Democrats and Independents (UDI). Meeting in congress in Boulogne-Billancourt (Hauts-de-Seine), the center-right party is preparing to appoint, Saturday, December 10, its new president, the senator from Hauts-de-Seine Hervé Marseille. Chance of the calendar, this election at the head of the UDI comes as its former boss, Jean-Christophe Lagarde, was sentenced on Wednesday to ten months in prison, suspended, for having provided his mother-in-law with a fictitious job. as a parliamentary assistant between 2009 and 2010. A conviction he intends to appeal.

Weakened for several months by legal affairs and increasingly challenged internally, the former deputy for Seine-Saint-Denis (2002-2022), who also lost his post in the legislative elections of June 2022 after a defeat against the “rebellious” Raquel Garrido, had decided to hand over in September after eight years at the head of the UDI. At the end of an interim period of a few weeks, the only candidate for the succession of Mr. Lagarde, the president of the Union centriste group, Hervé Marseille, will take the head of a party in clear decline since the eruption of Emmanuel Macron and his takeover bid on the center.

While it still had a group in the National Assembly during the last legislature, the UDI, which claims 10,000 members and several hundred local elected officials, only managed to save three seats in June. deputies who have all joined the heterogeneous group Libertés, Independants, Overseas Territories and Territories (LIOT). “It is the circumstances that made me become president”admits the senator from Hauts-de-Seine, from his office which offers him a view of the Luxembourg garden.

Strategic position

If he is still unknown to the general public despite several decades of mandate including eighteen years as mayor of Meudon, Hervé Marseille, 68, is one of the centerpieces of parliamentary life thanks to his group composed of fifty-seven senators moored senatorial majority in an alliance with Les Républicains. A strategic post while the government, to circumvent the instability of the National Assembly, relies more and more on the Luxembourg Palace to pass its bills. “Hervé Marseille has a group that can make and break majorities. He almost finds himself in the situation of the LRs in the Assembly ”, estimates the vice-president of the Renaissance group, Sylvain Maillard, a former member of the UDI.

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