Good results in legislative elections can bring big rewards to political parties. The public aid paid to them by the State is in fact calculated according to the number of votes received in the first round and the number of deputies and senators elected. Failure to respect parity, on the other hand, costs them dearly.
As soon as the results of the early legislative elections were known, on Sunday July 7, the treasurers of the various parties took out their calculators. Because the vote of the electors has not only redrawn the political balances in the National Assembly. The amount of public funding paid to the various political parties depends on the total number of votes garnered in the first round and the number of deputies sent to the hemicycle in the second.
Campaign costs, remuneration of permanent employees, rental of premises… Political parties have significant operating costs, particularly during election periods. To support them, but also to avoid hidden funding and financial pressure, public aid is enshrined in law and paid each year. Private donations may be added, which are capped at 7,500 euros per year and per person.
The envelope distributed by the State is divided into two parts. The first depends on the number of votes received by each party in the first round of the legislative elections. For a party to receive part of it, the rule is simple: it must have won at least 1% of the votes cast in at least 50 constituencies in the first round. If this condition is met, each vote brings in 1.61 euros to the party. The second part of the public aid is proportional to the number of deputies and senators each party has. Only parties benefiting from the first part of the aid are eligible for the second.
In 2024, the total amount of aid granted was €66.43 million, shared between the first and second fractions, according to a decree published in February. The first envelope amounted to more than €32 million. As for the second, it was more than €34 million. But what will happen after these legislative elections? Franceinfo has done the math and attempted an estimate.
The first part of the aid can however be reduced if the parties do not respect parity between male and female candidates. This penalty provided for by the 1988 law was toughened in 2014. If a political party presents more than 2% of candidates of one sex compared to the other during the legislative elections, the amount of financial aid it receives is reduced by 150% of this difference. Thus, if a party presents 55 male and 45 female candidates in the elections, i.e. a difference of 10% between men and women, the amount of its public aid will be reduced by 15% after application of the penalty.
With only 11 women for 51 men on its lists, On the right, the movement of Eric Ciotti, contested president of LR, risks seeing its public aid reduced by almost 96.8%, going from a little less than 2 million euros to 63,175.93 euros. For their part, Les Républicains will certainly see their envelope melt by more than 58.3%, a rate comparable to that applied after the 2022 legislative elections which was around 56%. This is not the first time that the party has paid the price for a lack of parity.
Conversely, the French Communist Party and La France Insoumise are those who have best respected parity in these elections. Their public aid should only be reduced by 2.46% and 3.25% respectively.
Following these legislative elections, two parties in particular will see their public funding envelope increase. With around 9.34 million votes in the first round, the National Rally could receive an amount of nearly 13.8 million euros, more than double the current amount (6.8 million euros) calculated from the results of the 2022 legislative elections. The amounts that franceinfo has calculated here take into account the penalty linked to non-compliance with parity. On the other side of the hemicycle, it is the Socialist Party that wins the jackpot. Its candidates collected more than 2.8 million votes in the first round, which would represent nearly 3.4 million euros, compared to less than 1.4 million before the early poll.
The two big losers in these elections are Reconquête and Les Républicains. The far-right party led by Eric Zemmour lost more than 83% of its public funding between the 2022 and 2024 legislative elections. In the first round, its candidates received only 0.75% of the vote, a score well below the 4.24% obtained in the 2022 legislative elections. As a result, public funding is expected to decrease by more than €1.5 million, to just €250,760. On the right, LR lost €1 million in funding, going from €2.3 to around €1.3 million.
On the presidential camp side, the aid is allocated to the Ensemble coalition and not to the different parties that make it up. This funding is then divided between Renaissance, MoDem and Horizons, in proportion to the number of deputies of each, according to information from franceinfo. Ensemble should therefore receive 8.7 million euros for the first part of its subsidy, without much change compared to the situation before dissolution (8.8 million euros). In the first round, Ensemble in fact garnered more than 6.4 million votes, compared to 5.8 million in 2022. Here again, the calculation takes into account the penalty for non-compliance with parity.
In addition to this first part of public funding, the parties receive a second aid from the State, calculated according to the number of elected representatives who represent them in the Senate and the National Assembly. Each elected representative allows the party to receive 37,119 euros. The number of senators has not changed since the last senatorial elections in September 2023. On the other hand, the recent legislative elections have reshuffled the cards on the side of the Palais-Bourbon.
Newly elected MPs have until the evening of July 17 to declare to the office of the National Assembly which party they belong to.
We will therefore have to wait for the final formation of the parliamentary groups and the official publication of their composition to know the exact amount of this second envelope of public aid. While waiting for this officialization, franceinfo has calculated the amounts of this second aid based on the declarations made in the prefecture by the candidates during their investiture in the first round of the legislative elections.
The National Rally is certainly almost absent from the Senate, with only three representatives, but it is making strong progress in the Assembly, with 126 elected representatives, compared to 88 previously. This significant increase would allow the RN to benefit from a 41% increase in the second part of its public funding. Its amount should be around 4.8 million euros, which would represent a total allocation of 18.6 million euros.
On the left, the Socialist Party, which is making a strong comeback in the Assembly thanks to the New Popular Front, is also seeing its budget increase. Compared to 2022, the amount of the second aid will increase by more than 43%, from 3.3 million to 4.8 million euros.
According to franceinfo calculations, with 157 deputies and 39 senators, the The presidential coalition Ensemble would receive more than 7.3 million euros for the second aid. The Macronist candidates are those who benefited the most from the withdrawals and the Republican front against the far right in the second round. The presidential camp thus saved the furniture in the National Assembly. However, by going from 250 to 157 deputies, the former majority risks suffering a reduction of more than 30% of its aid which represented, at the end of the 2022 legislative elections, more than 10.7 million euros. In total, the party should therefore receive 16 million euros if we add the two parts of public aid.
Just behind, we find Les Républicains, particularly present in the Senate with 131 parliamentarians, to which are added 34 deputies. They should thus receive approximately 6.1 million euros. The envelope intended for LR therefore risks melting by 15%.
This second envelope benefits more the larger parties, which benefit from enough votes to enter Parliament. The smaller parties, such as Reconquête or Lutte Ouvrière, rely more on the first part of aid, based on the number of votes, to finance their operations.