The name of the third person in state should not change this Monday. The president of the upper house Gérard Larcher awaits his re-election at the helm of the Senate for a fifth three-year term in this position, a formality for this tenor of the right, supported by the center and appreciated beyond.
At 74 years old, the senator from Yvelines has no concerns about the secret ballot organized shortly after 3 p.m. in the hemicycle, eight days after the senatorial elections. He will return to the “plateau”, the seat of the president of the High Assembly which he occupied from 2008 to 2011 and since 2014.
Acclaim and unanimous support from his camp
Designated as candidate on Wednesday by acclamation by his parliamentary group (The Republicans), by far the leading political force in the Senate, he also received last week the unanimous support of the centrist Union, another pillar of the senatorial majority. This ensures the former mayor of Rambouillet a comfortable majority in the vote which will pit him against Patrick Kanner, Guillaume Gontard and Cécile Cukiermann, respective leaders of the socialist, environmentalist and communist groups.
Other minority groups, such as the RDSE (mainly radicals) or the Independents group, with a sensitivity close to Edouard Philippe’s Horizons party, are not presenting a candidate against the Senate leader.
In 2020, Gérard Larcher was re-elected very largely, with 231 votes out of 348, and the balance of power has not changed since, 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. Just re-elected in Yvelines for a sixth term as senator – winning four of the six seats in the department on his list – the personality of Gérard Larcher brings people together beyond his political family. “We fight him as we must fight him, but that in no way prevents his individual qualities,” Patrick Kanner recently said.
A role reinforced by divisions in the Assembly
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, the patriarch of the upper house intends to “legislate better, legislate less” during his new mandate, proposing a “real cure of normative austerity”.
A fierce defender of territorial France, he also highlights in his priorities the need to “strengthen the presence of senators in the territories”, even if it means reducing the time spent in session at the Luxembourg Palace during certain so-called “control” weeks. In this project, he also promises that he will “return to the charge with the government” to make it reverse the law of non-cumulative mandates of 2014.