They are 1,819 candidates for 170 seats. Like every three years, the Senate renews itself by half on September 24, and the list of contenders was transmitted by the services of the upper house. The candidates had until Friday 6:00 p.m. to declare themselves to the prefecture in the forty departments concerned by this election which will renew 170 of the 348 seats in the hemicycle.
Unsurprisingly, there are more of them than in the previous senatorial elections in 2020, where 1,533 candidates declared themselves for these elections by indirect suffrage. The figure is close to the 2017 record (1,996 candidates for 171 seats), when Emmanuel Macron’s La République en Marche, which had just come to power, presented candidates throughout France. The Senate services nevertheless specified that this data would be completed in the coming days with regard to Guadeloupe, Martinique and Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon, whose applications were still incomplete at the start of the weekend due to the delay. hourly.
Gérard Larcher and Patrick Kanner as regulars
There have never been so many women running as candidates (46.67%), but only a quarter of them (26.2%) appear at the top of their list in the departments where senators are elected by ballot proportional. Two voting methods coexist: in the departments where one or two senators are elected, the election takes place by majority vote in two rounds (one round in the morning, the other in the afternoon); and in the other departments, it takes place by proportional list voting in one round.
Among the 119 outgoing senators seeking a new six-year term, we find the president of the Senate Gérard Larcher (Yvelines, Les Républicains) and the president of the socialist group Patrick Kanner (North). The oldest candidate is also an incumbent: centrist senator Jean-Marie Vanlerenberghe, who is aiming for a 4th term in Pas-de-Calais at 84 years old. The youngest candidate, Morgane Rengard, is 24 years old (the minimum age to run as a candidate). Around 79,000 voters are called to the polls on September 24, most of them from municipal councils.