The legislative elections, a key election politically… and financially. If the socialist leadership is so keen on the agreement with rebellious France, it is because it can allow it to keep a few feathers after the presidential debacle and the 1.75% of Anne Hidalgo which will not give it access to reimbursement campaign costs. Because it is from the legislative elections that the public financing granted to the parties each year is defined.
The amount of public aid is divided into two fractions, one calculated on the number of votes in the first round, the other on the number of parliamentary seats obtained. A political movement can receive this funding if it has presented a candidate in at least fifty constituencies and they have obtained at least 1% of the votes cast.
The more MPs the PS can save, the more money it can get
Each vote for a candidate, whether elected or not, brings a little more than 1.5 euros to his party. Then, each year, parliamentarians (deputies and senators) declare their attachment to a party, and the latter receives nearly 37,200 euros per elected official. The more MPs the PS can save, the more money it can get. Knowing that these last five years have not been good compared to the years 2012.
According to the Commission for Campaign Accounts and Political Funding, for the year 2020, the pink party thus received just over 6 million euros in public funding, in part thanks to its 26 outgoing deputies, which corresponds to nearly 32% of its annual budget.
Either a shortfall of 18 million per year, because after the legislative elections of 2012, he received more than 24 million euros in aid thanks in particular to the 289 deputies attached to his group. Not to mention what elected officials also donate from their salaries to their party. In 2020, all elected officials combined, the PS received nearly 5 million contributions. In view of the results of the first round of the presidential election, how many deputies could the PS alone save? And its finances, supported by the party federations but already well weighed down, would they recover?