Half of the Senate is renewed in an indirect vote on Sunday September 24. The opportunity to revisit the preconceived ideas that sometimes stick to the skin of these elected officials. While some are justified, others require nuance.
“The Senate is just a retirement home for the politically privileged!” Caricature, Noël Mamère? The former environmentalist MP revealed his thoughts in 1999, in his book My Republic. An observation shared by some French people, if we are to believe the polls. According to Ifop in 2015, 57% of those questioned wanted the Senate to be fundamentally reformed and 21% wanted it to be abolished.
Already in 1998, when Lionel Jospin had to deal with a right-wing Senate, the Prime Minister of cohabitation described the upper house as“anomaly among democracies“. Not modern enough, not representative enough of the population, not equal enough or too expensive, according to the French… The criticisms are rife. On the eve of the senatorial elections, Sunday September 24, which will renew 170 seats out of 348, franceinfo looked at the most common preconceived ideas regarding senators.
1“Senators are old”: true
With an average age of 60 at the time of voting in 2020, senators are the oldest elected officials in the Fifth Republic. Three years after the last senatorial elections which brought 178 seats into play, the average age today stands at 63 years old. Far from the 48.5 years of the 577 deputies elected during the 2022 legislative elections. In detail, 149 of the 348 current senators are between 60 and 69 years old. There are 84 of them who are between 70 and 79 years old, according to calculations carried out by franceinfo. The dean of the Senate is Jean-Marie Vanlerenberghe, senator from Pas-de-Calais. He is 84 years old.
This advanced average age can be explained firstly by the voting method. Senators are elected by a college elected officials from their constituency. A lasting local anchor is therefore necessary to convince these major voters. According to political scientist Olivier Rouquan, in 20 minutes, “he It is often necessary to have proven oneself as an elected official, to have notable legitimacy”.
Furthermore, when the Upper House was created in 1795, you had to be at least 40 years old to be admitted, hence its name at the time, the Council of Elders, recalls the Senate website. Since then, efforts have been made to attract new blood. In 2011, the minimum age to run was increased from 30 to 24. The youngest senator is Rémi Cardon (Somme), 29 years old. Despite everything, the average age of senators is decreasing little. They were, at the time of the election, 62 years old in 2004 and 61 years old in 2014.
2“Senators hold their seats for decades”: rather false
In 1919, the senator from Rhône Edouard Herriot left the Luxembourg Palace, not without mocking the longevity of his colleagues: “The Senate is an assembly of men with fixed ideas, fortunately corrected by abundant mortality.” More than a hundred years later, relatively few senators have more than two terms under their belt. There are in fact 47 of them exercising their third or fourth mandate, according to our count. Conversely, 56.6% of senators are serving or completing their first term. For comparison, in the 2022 legislative elections, the younger Assembly had only 52% first-time deputies.
3 “There are very few women in the Senate”: mostly true
The Senate is lagging behind parity. However, the number of female senators has continued to increase in recent years. There are 122 of them in office on the eve of the elections, or 35.1% of the Upper House. A figure still far from balance, but which has increased tenfold between 1989 and 2017. Ultimately, the Senate is not much more masculine than the National Assembly and its 37.26% of female deputies. Furthermore, of the eight positions of vice-presidents of the Senate in 2023, four are occupied by women. But never before has a senator presided over the chamber of the Luxembourg Palace.
4“Senators are all executives”: rather true
If 28% of senators are employees, 16% from the judicial and liberal professions and 14% civil servants, their distribution by socio-professional category is very homogeneous. According to franceinfo estimates, more than 65% of them belong to the category of “executives and higher intellectual professions”, 10.1% come from the category “intermediate professions” and 9.2% are craftsmen, traders and business leaders. But, of the 348 elected officials, none have been workers since the departure of Martial Bourquin in 2020. A situation that he regretted at the end of his mandate with Public Senate: “There are five, six million workers in France and being the only one in the Senate who has worked on an assembly line for years poses a real problem.”
The same observation arises in the National Assembly. After the 2022 legislative elections, 58.4% of the deputies were executives while there were only 18.4% in the active population. It is the opposite for workers, who are under-represented in the Palais-Bourbon: 0.9% of deputies are workers even though the latter constitute nearly 20% of the active population.
5“Senators combine mandates”: to put into perspective
In 2012, 77% of senators held at least one other elective mandate, according to the Vie publique website. Alongside their position in Parliament, they were mayors (or deputies), presidents (or vice-presidents) of a regional council or an intercommunity. The laws of February 14, 2014 removed the accumulation of a parliamentary mandate with a local executive mandate. Since the entry into force of the reform during the 2017 senatorial elections, no senator has combined his mandate with another executive mandate. Furthermore, a senator does not have the right to be part of the government, nor to be a European deputy. If a situation of accumulation arises, he has thirty days to choose one of the positions.
However, to maintain a local anchor, senators can hold local non-executive mandates. They can, for example, be municipal, departmental or regional councilors. This is currently the case for 230 senators, according to franceinfo calculations. Or two-thirds of the Senate.
6“Senators are expensive”: to put into perspective
A senator earns on average 7,605.70 euros gross per month, to which is added compensation for any senator exercising a particular function, ranging from 745.36 to 4,426.52 euros. He also has a monthly mandate fee advance of 5,900 euros to cover expenses related to the exercise of his functions. Last year, the Senate spent 315 million euros in operating expenses compared to 567 million in the Assembly. This cost represented 0.001% of the state budget in 2018, according to France Inter.