MPs are still at the top of the income scale, but they have been dropping since the 2000s. They are now among the top 3% of French people, according to a note from the Institute of Public Policy published this week. . Supporters of more distribution of wealth and social justice can always console themselves by saying that twenty years ago, MPs belonged to the most favored 1%.
Deputies as senators receive a monthly allowance of 7,493 euros gross per month, aligned with the treatment of very high officials of the Council of State. This remuneration allows “any citizen, whatever his social condition, to be able to exercise a mandate” and it is “the price of the independence and the dignity of the function”, underlines the site of the National Assembly.
La vida loca
The study since 1914 of the amount of the “real allowance” of the deputies, by deducting the expenses related to the mandate (parliamentary permanence, collaborators…). During the 20th century, this real level reached between 3 and 5 times the average worker’s wage. And between 1945 and the end of the 1990s, the parliamentary allowance placed deputies among the 1% of French people with the highest incomes.
But from the 2000s, this income experienced “a significant drop”, which pushed parliamentarians down from the rank of 1% to the rank of the 3% of the highest paid French people, calculated the authors of the study. Because the remuneration is then “linked to the index point (of the civil servants) only, without the possibility of additional support for their expenses”.
In addition, the non-cumulation of mandates since 2017 has limited other sources of income. The authors make the link with the evolution of the mandate of deputy itself, which resembles “less and less a liberal profession” and more and more “a status of salaried executive”, with unemployment insurance at the end of similar mandate, a common law pension plan, as well as more stringent ethical rules.