“The Senate is the itch of macronism” | EUROtoday

While 170 senators noticed their seats put again into play on Sunday September 24, Olivier Rozenberg, political scientist and researcher at the Center for European Studies and Comparative Politics at Sciences Po, noticed that the Senate has seen its function strengthened lately. The causes are a number of: the legislation on the non-cumulation of mandates of 2014, the loss of an absolute majority in the National Assembly in 2022 and even the work of senators controlling the government since the Benalla affair in 2018 .

Many native elected officers say that deputies are abandoning constituency work to commit themselves to creating the legislation in Paris. They consider that senators are their final representatives. With the non-cumulation of mandates since 2014, a shift would have occurred. How do you analyze it?

Several parts can clarify this notion. First of all, native elected officers elect senators, who naturally deal with them properly, with respect and consideration. The deputies, appointed by the folks by direct vote, will not be on this state of affairs.

Then, we will see it as a consequence of the renewal of the National Assembly. The one elected in 2017 had three quarters of new deputies. And, in 2022, half have been renewed once more. Their profile is totally different from that of their predecessors. Among them there are fewer former native elected officers, extra novices, on the one hand, and former cupboard members or parliamentary collaborators, on the different.

In the Senate, on the different hand, everybody comes from native authorities. Senators are profitable native elected officers. In truth, they know the establishments on the floor very properly, and those that help them as a result of they’ve labored with them for ten, twenty, thirty years…

And they’ve the similar political label…

This is the third rationalization. Local political life is in step with the composition of the Senate: 62% of the seats are occupied by the Republicans or the Socialist Party, the former authorities events. In the National Assembly, their share is solely 15%. The events which dominate at the Palais-Bourbon have extraordinarily restricted native roots, whether or not they’re the Macronists, the La France Insoumise or the National Rally deputies.

Since 2022, can the frontal, even aggressive, nature of debates in the Assembly additionally have an effect?

It is above all a query of picture, as a result of many of these new deputies are exactly searching for to play the recreation of the constituency. But native elected officers, who help conventional authorities events, could also be reluctant to collaborate with parliamentarians who symbolize the extremes. Quite just because they don’t share their concepts, and so they might worry being related to them. On the different hand, a center-right or center-left senator could appear extra reassuring.

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