2023-09-25 11:00:01
Emmanuel Macron’s televised intervention on Sunday September 24, seeking in particular to reassure the French at a time of expensive oil and ecological planning, did not overshadow the result of the senatorial elections. In this High Assembly which represents the territories and which the center right has dominated almost structurally since 1958, if we except the short socialist parenthesis of 2011-2014, political upheavals are rare. They are in fact amortized by the double effect of indirect suffrage and the three-year renewal of half of the senators.
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The variations which have just occurred there and which are essentially based on the result of the 2020 municipal elections are no less significant: the presidential party, Renaissance, losing momentum, confirms its difficulties in establishing itself and is experiencing, in contrast, the progress of its ally Horizons, the party of Edouard Philippe, which is increasingly positioning itself as a contender to succeed Emmanuel Macron. The National Rally (RN), which no longer had any elected officials, brought in three, including one in Seine-et-Marne. This is a sign that the body of electors is gradually allowing itself to be tamed by a formation which has until now been carefully kept aside, but which is gaining strength in the rural and peri-urban world. The non-Melenchonist left is progressing in all its components, reviving the divide with the right. The Les Républicains (LR) party and the center right retain their comfortable majority, the latter somewhat rebalancing its positions compared to the first.
Distorting mirror of electoral reality
These different movements do not affect the dominant position of the outgoing LR president, Gérard Larcher, who, re-elected in Yvelines, is heading, at 74, towards his sixth term by promising to make the High Assembly “an essential counter-power to democracy”.
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The Senate, however, is not the National Assembly. If he has the power to amend, enrich or counter, he cannot overthrow the government. However, it is by this yardstick that the power of oppositions is assessed today. Entering resistance during the election of Emmanuel Macron in 2017, the senatorial right has since used all registers to try to limit presidential power without managing to score significant points: offensive during the Benalla affair in 2018, gravedigger during the attempted constitutional revision of 2019, she has been trying since the second five-year term to appear as the one who dictates her reforms to a weakened president. But, on pensions, the LR deputies, torn into factions, undermined the senatorial work. And on immigration, a subject on which their position is hardening, the LR senators will have to reckon with the push of the centrists, much more inclined than them to validate the project of creating a residence permit in professions in tension.
A distorting mirror of the country’s electoral reality, the result of the senatorial elections cannot hide the state of disrepair of the Republican right, which no longer has a doctrine or a natural candidate and is approaching the European election of June 2024 with great concern. The risk is great for LR of being caught again between Renaissance and the RN and of not having enough strength to propel a candidate for the 2027 presidential election. In this context, the pretensions of the President of the Senate, now de facto strong man of the right, are necessarily limited. They consist of defending the identity of one’s camp as much as possible without insulting the future, which amounts to saying as much good things about Laurent Wauquiez as about Edouard Philippe while waiting for things to settle down.
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