The Door Built for the Greens

About 93,000 people voted in France’s national election on Sunday. The Senate’s own figures put the electoral college for this half of the chamber at 93,469 grands électeurs, and 95.2 per cent of them are delegates of municipal councils. They chose 178 of the Senate’s 348 members, for six-year terms, in the departments whose turn it was.

The result, in the words of the Senate’s president, Gérard Larcher, on Sunday night, was that “la majorité sénatoriale demeure largement la première force politique du Sénat”: the centre-right majority remains by a distance the largest force in the chamber. France 24 reports that Larcher, 77, is expected to be re-elected to the presidency next week.

The change is smaller in seats and larger in procedure. The National Rally won nine seats, which with the three it took in 2023 and two won by its ally Éric Ciotti’s Union des droites pour la République gives the bloc 14, according to France 24. Sébastien Chenu gave the same figure, “14 sénateurs,” on Public Sénat at 8.05pm. Fourteen is enough to form a group. The party has never had one.

“This is a historic victory,” Marine Le Pen wrote on X, “and a major milestone with the formation for the first time of a group in the Senate.” She led with the group, not the seats. That was the right order.

What a group is for

In the Senate a senator without a group is a vote. A senator in a group is part of the machinery. The Senate’s own guide to its political groups sets out what that means: only a group can register its members to speak in debate, the permanent committees are filled by proportional representation among the groups, and the Senate pays each group an annual subsidy with a fixed element and an element that grows with its size.

An unattached senator can vote on everything and shape very little. Speaking time, committee places, staff money and the right to be consulted when the chamber organises its business all run through the groups. For a party that has sent a handful of senators to the Luxembourg Palace since 2014 without any of that, the difference between thirteen seats and fourteen is the difference between attendance and participation.

The threshold, and who it was lowered for

The same page states the rule in a line: “chaque groupe doit compter au moins 10 membres.” Every group must have at least ten members.

It was not always ten. In November 2011 the new president of the Senate, Jean-Pierre Bel, tabled a resolution to amend the chamber’s rules. The September 2011 elections had doubled the number of ecologist senators, and they still could not form a group. The resolution said so plainly: the ecologists “ne peuvent en l’état actuel de notre Règlement constituer un groupe,” and its first article therefore set out “à abaisser de quinze à dix l’effectif minimum d’un groupe.”

The purpose was pluralism, and the ecologists got their group. Fifteen years later the door they were given is the one the National Rally has walked through. On the figure the party itself gave on Sunday night, fourteen, the 2011 rule is the reason it has a group at all. Under the rule it replaced, the bloc would have been one senator short.

That is not an argument that the rule was a mistake. A threshold lowered to let a small party in has no way of distinguishing between small parties, and was never meant to. It is a reminder that procedural rules are written for the parties in the room and then outlive them.

An electorate of councillors

The second rule doing the work on Sunday is the franchise. Because nineteen in twenty of the electors are delegates of municipal councils, a Senate election is a delayed reading of municipal politics. The councils that chose Sunday’s delegates are the ones elected in March. A party that wins town halls wins electors six months later; a party that wins national polls but not councils does not.

The voting system then depends on the department. According to the Senate’s election site, departments electing three or more senators use proportional representation with lists that must alternate men and women; those electing one or two use a two-round majority vote, with both rounds on the same day. The Senate describes the proportional method as applying to about three senators in four, while its results summary reports 67 per cent of Sunday’s seats filled that way. The site does not reconcile the two figures.

Both systems reward presence in the councils. The National Rally’s gains in the Senate are the downstream effect of its gains in local government, which is slower ground and more durable ground than a national poll.

What the counts do not yet agree on

Final numbers were still moving on Monday morning. France 24 reports that La France insoumise won its first-ever seat in the Senate; Public Sénat’s live coverage names two newly elected LFI senators, Gabriel Amard in the Rhône and Marc Péré in Haute-Garonne. Public Sénat also puts the combined RN and allied grouping at fourteen or fifteen depending on attachments not yet declared. This article uses fourteen, the figure both the party and France 24 gave.

The formal step comes next. After every renewal, each group must deliver to the Senate presidency its list of members and a political declaration, and state whether it is an opposition group. Until those lists are filed, the group exists in statements on election night. Once filed, it exists in the rules, with its speaking slots, its committee seats and its subsidy, until the next renewal.