2023-09-09 18:00:10
On board his campaign bus, socialist senator Patrick Kanner travels across the North to meet local elected officials. By September 24, the date of the senatorial election, he will have visited around a hundred communes out of the 648 in the department. Thousands of kilometers traveled, to convince the electors to offer him a second term. “Local elected officials are the leaders of the Republic”, argues the former minister of the city of François Hollande. For this election, the Socialist Party (PS), the second group in the Senate behind the right and ahead of the centrists, calls into play thirty-three positions, with the handicap of seeing eleven important senators withdraw, like the former mayor of Orléans and Pierre Bérégovoy’s secretary of state, Jean-Pierre Sueur (Loiret), or François Hollande’s former secretary of state André Vallini (Isère).
The ecologists, who succeeded in forming a group in the Senate in 2020, in the wake of the municipal elections, renew four senators out of twelve. As for the Communists, they put eleven of their fifteen seats back into play. With ninety-one seats, the left hopes to strengthen itself by reaching one hundred elected officials.
To do this, she is banking on her alliances, while divisions have rarely been so strong among Les Républicains. Before the summer, socialists, ecologists and communists reached an agreement in fifteen departments. A way to contain the multiplication of lists, deadly in this complex election. Particularity of the ballot, dissent can lose votes without this benefiting anyone, each seat being dependent on a minimum number of votes.
“We had to make an effort”
In Paris, the left is already assured, barring any drama, of obtaining seven seats. But she hopes to take advantage of her union list, led by the outgoing socialist Rémi Féraud, to obtain an eighth place. Former environmentalist presidential candidate Yannick Jadot and communist Ian Brossat are expected to enter the Senate. Before reaching an agreement, the PS was torn apart for several weeks, replaying the divisions which poison it at the national level, between the first secretary, Olivier Faure, and his number two, the mayor of Rouen, Nicolas Mayer-Rossignol.
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Finally, facing the Paris federation, where those close to Anne Hidalgo are maneuvering, the leader of the PS gave up having a candidate in an eligible position. Even among Faure’s supporters, the negotiations around the senatorial elections have left their mark. The PS leadership favored, to everyone’s surprise, Maxime des Gayets, regional councilor of Ile-de-France, placed in 9th place, to the detriment of the party’s treasurer, Fatima Yadani, relegated to the end of the list. “We have the impression that in the Socialist Party, the glass ceiling for women is still very present”laments Fatima Yadani, twenty-five years of PS on the clock.
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