2023-09-22 12:14:31
Sunday September 24, 170 of the 348 seats in the Senate will be renewed during the senatorial elections. No suspense: the right will remain in the majority there. The Les Républicains (LR) group, which currently has 145 seats, and its centrist allies (57 seats), will retain their dominant position within the High Assembly. A constant in the history of the Fifth Republic, with the sole exception of the period 2011-2014 when the left took away the majority at the Luxembourg Palace.
This stability is largely explained by the voting method. To win the Senate, you must have a strong network of local elected officials who will feed the body of major voters. And among them, rural elected officials are over-represented and tend to vote more for the conservatives. Conversely, city elected officials are less represented, even though the majority of the population is urban.
Finally, the inertia of the Senate is due to the fact that it is only renewed by half. Clearly, it is only part of its majority acquired in the last elections that the LR group is putting into play: 80 of the 145 seats it holds are not affected by this election.
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The left intends to take several seats
The representatives of the different groups only foresee marginal changes in the composition of the Senate following the election.
On the Republican side, the outlook oscillates “between a loss of five seats or a gain of two seats”according to Hauts-de-Seine senator Roger Karoutchi interviewed by Franceinfo. The prospects for the Centrist Union (UC) are not very different, since according to him they are between “ a loss of four seats or a gain of three seats”. The elections would, however, be rather favorable for Horizons, the party of former Prime Minister Edouard Philippe, which hopes to have a dozen elected representatives in the Senate, compared to seven today.
On the left, the socialists (64 elected currently) and the communists (15 elected) aim for “stability”. But the task will possibly be more difficult for the latter, because more than two thirds of their seats are affected by the election this year. The indirect voting method is not favorable to them either, because the communists lost several municipalities, and therefore major voters, in 2020. Conversely, the environmentalists could benefit from their good results in the 2020 municipal elections to win three to four seats, possibly going from a dozen to around fifteen elected officials.
Absent from the Senate since the visit of Senator Stéphane Ravier to Eric Zemmour last year, the National Rally (RN) hopes to make its return there. The far-right party is mainly targeting Pas-de-Calais, where it believes that four of the department’s nine seats are “taken”. But such a scenario would still not allow it to have its own political group and the influence that goes with it, the minimum required being ten elected officials.
Alternation in the Senate is mathematically possible if the left wins 54 seats, the environmentalists, 14, while the Republicans and the centrists lose 52 and 12 respectively. Mathematically possible, but politically very improbable. Unless there is a surprise, the balance of power should change little.
The tool below, developed on the basis of these observations, makes it possible to simulate several results of Sunday’s election, and thus to vary the size of the political groups in the Senate.
Voting scenarios for the 2023 senatorial elections
Move the sliders or click on the scenarios below to change the number of seats in each group and modify the balance of power in the Senate.
The minimum number of each slide corresponds to the base of senators of the group whose mandate is not called into play in 2023.
Reset Likely scenario What the left hopes for What the right hopes for What it would take to change the majority
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