The President of the Senate Gérard Larcher was comfortably re-elected this Monday, October 2 at the helm of the upper house for a fifth three-year term in this position, a formality for this tenor of the right, supported by the center and appreciated beyond. The senator from Yvelines collected 218 votes out of 320 cast, against 64 for the socialist Patrick Kanner, 20 for the communist Cécile Cukierman and 18 for the ecologist Guillaume Gontard, on the first day of the parliamentary session.
Eight days after the senatorial elections which kept the right in power in the Senate, the 74-year-old senator returns to the “plateau”, the seat of the president of the High Assembly which he occupied from 2008 to 2011 and since 2014. The Senate is more than ever at the heart of democratic life,” he declared in the chamber once elected, at the dawn of lively debates this fall on immigration or the budget. Faced with “a deep crisis”, the President of the Senate called for “breaking with this spiral of decline”, inviting his colleagues to “legislate better, legislate less”. Praised by his political family (The Republicans), Gérard Larcher was able to count on the support of the centrist Union, another pillar of the senatorial majority, in a secret ballot but without surprise.
Other minority groups, such as the RDSE (mainly radicals), the Macronist group (RDPI) or the group of Independents, with a sensitivity close to Edouard Philippe’s Horizons party, have not proposed a candidate against to Gérard Larcher. Even if the right experienced a slight erosion during the senatorial elections of September 24, with a dozen seats lost according to the latest estimates, the reappointment of Gérard Larcher was beyond doubt. “He embodies our institution. With him, we managed to raise the image of the Senate” in the face of a “hysterized” National Assembly, said the head of senators LR Bruno Retailleau on France 2 this Monday.
The hemicycle recomposed Tuesday
“He is a president that we appreciate and who ensures the balance of the senatorial majority in its diversity,” explained in recent days the president of the centrist group, Hervé Marseille, interviewed by AFP. The absence of a majority from the presidential camp in the National Assembly since 2022 has only strengthened the role of Gérard Larcher, on whom the executive regularly tries to rely on to obtain compromises on legal texts.
In his project addressed to his fellow senators and consulted by AFP, the patriarch of the upper house intends to propose a “real cure of normative austerity”, as he repeated this Monday. A fierce defender of territorial France, he also highlights in his priorities the need to “put mayors back at the heart of decision-making”, a “loyally extended hand” to the executive.
Third figure in the State, Gérard Larcher has also returned to the front line in recent years for having played the role of “counter-power” to which he is very attached through the Senate. The various commissions of inquiry (Benalla, consulting firms, Marianne funds, etc.) led by the upper house have had a significant impact in the public debate. The Senate “has managed to be the point of balance for a struggling democracy. An assembly which accepts its differences”, assured Gérard Larcher. The Senate continues its recomposition on Tuesday with the formalization of the composition of the parliamentary groups, before the renewal of the office and commissions scheduled for Wednesday. Most of the groups have already proceeded with the election of their president, including the latest, the radical group RDSE made up of around fifteen members which chose Maryse Carrère (Radical Left Party) at its head on Monday.