This Monday, July 8, the 577 new deputies of the National Assembly officially began their mandate. In the chamber, there are many new faces, novices in politics, unknown to the general public or from civil society: for example, there is an elected official who was previously a head chef in a high school, an economics student, a train driver or even association leaders.
Despite this apparent diversity, the National Assembly remains poorly representative of French voters. Only 36% of women will occupy the red seats in the chamber – compared to 39% in 2017 -, 74% of the new deputies are classified as “executives and higher intellectual professions”, as counted The worldand only four of them are workers – compared to 19% of the active French population. Finally, the majority of the elected candidates already served in the last Assembly: 408 outgoing deputies were thus re-elected during these early legislative elections. Rémi Lefebvre, professor of political science at the University of Lille and researcher at CERAPS, analyzes the sociology of this new National Assembly for L’Express.
L’Express: Among the new deputies elected to the National Assembly, we find certain profiles from civil society, whom we are not used to seeing sitting in the chamber. Is this sociology of elected officials new?
Rémi Lefebvre: Despite a few rare exceptions, the new National Assembly is not so representative of voters. For example, there have never been so few workers in the Assembly. We are rather on a domination of senior executives with degrees, often from the public sector – except on the Renaissance side, with a huge number of private sector employees since 2017. There is very clearly, in this new Assembly, a domination of social elites, characterized by the CSP +.
The same goes for women, who are less represented than in 2022. This is explained in particular by an intensification of political competition, associated with a very rapid selection of candidates for the legislative elections, due to the surprise dissolution of June 9. This therefore worked in favor of those who have the most social resources, that is to say the most qualified, mostly men, in a logic of elitism. You thus have, among the elected officials, a large majority of outgoing deputies or collaborators of elected officials, directly from the political world. I am thinking for example of Adrien Le Coq, elected from the 1st constituency of the North for La France Insoumise (LFI), who is none other than the former campaign manager of Adrien Quatennens, his predecessor. Or Alexandre Dufosset on the National Rally (RN) side, elected from the 18th constituency of the North, who is in fact the former chief of staff of Sébastien Chenu.
In the first round of the legislative elections, many candidates who were new to politics or from civil society were nevertheless invested by parties of all persuasions. How can we explain such low diversity at the end?
There is a very strong inertia within the Assembly, firstly because outgoing MPs are often re-elected. When they nominate candidates, political parties are therefore not going to take the risk of disavowing their outgoing MP by replacing him with another candidate from civil society who is unknown to voters. There is thus a hierarchy based on the different constituencies: the social diversity of candidates will rather be highlighted in constituencies where competition is weak, in which there are not many issues, or which are simply not winnable. The hyper-professionalisation of politics in recent years has also played a major role, with huge disappointments for candidates from civil society, who have found themselves in difficulty – the parties are therefore banking less on these candidates.
At the same time, on the voters’ side, we must not forget that these elections were very nationalized, with a party label much more important in their eyes than the social characteristics of local candidates. The fact that a candidate was the same age or the same socio-professional category as them ultimately counted for little. But the problem remains: there is today an increasingly great dissonance between the representatives and those represented on the social level, which can weigh on certain parties. Voters from working-class or rural backgrounds, for example, do not identify at all with the qualified candidates who are finally elected, who live in the city and do not necessarily understand their issues.
So investing in candidates from civil society with the aim of getting them elected to the National Assembly is not really a winning bet?
No, it is not always very profitable politically, before and after the election, as we saw with the novices of La République en Marche (LREM) in 2017. They did not revolutionize politics at all, and did not really have their say in the debates. There were deputies who were described as “Playmobil” or bootlickers, with a logic of partisan discipline that left them little room for maneuver. A lot of work, notably that of my colleague Etienne Ollion, has shown that these novices were very quickly marginalized by other elected members of the majority, who knew the workings of politics. They had a lot of trouble counting, weighing in, and integrating.
Even if the social diversity of candidates is limited in this new Assembly, can certain profiles of elected officials, who have been highlighted a lot in the media, change the perception of the French about the political class?
Yes, because the French are precisely waiting for social diversification. Even if it must be remembered that a voter never votes for a candidate solely for their social profile, political parties have every interest in projecting an image of diversity. Look at what happened on the left, for example, with Rima Hassan on the list for the European elections: she was a very interesting profile to put forward for Jean-Luc Mélenchon as a lawyer specializing in human rights, from an immigrant background, and a Palestinian activist. In the same vein, the National Rally also had the reflex to seek out personalities from civil society, particularly due to a lack of available executives. But we have seen that this strategy has proven to be a double-edged sword.
The RN, which tries to distinguish itself as a party “close to the people” and anti-system, is not, moreover, very representative of the French in the National Assembly…
Indeed, the RN has drawn heavily on its pool of parliamentary assistants, political auxiliaries, and assistants to invest credible candidates in these legislative elections. In the next elections, the RN’s strategy will certainly be to continue the professionalization of the party, avoiding drawing on personalities from civil society, in favor of personalities with strong political background.
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