Historic election, young media stars, controversial speeches… We spent the day at the National Assembly

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annoying neighbors

The first day of a new legislature of the National Assembly necessarily has a back-to-school side: we do not always know who we are going to sit next to. Because the deputies do not yet sit by political groups, but in alphabetical order. Every five years, the observers sneer of certain explosive neighborhoods. In 2017, Jean-Luc Mélenchon was alongside Emmanuelle Ménard, the far-right MP for Béziers.

This year, note, for the good mouth, that Sandrine Rousseau, the green MP, and Fabien Roussel, the communist found themselves side by side. Just like Aurore Bergé, the president of the LREM-Rennaissance group and Ugo Bernalicis, rebellious from Lille. This does not prevent certain discussions between opponents and opponents, such as between Hervé Berville, Breton macronist, and Sophia Chikirou, rebellious Parisian. That’s good, everyone says it, in this Assembly without a majority and torn, we will have to discuss.

The next game to win

Tuesday is not over and everyone is already thinking of Thursday. Thursday is the election of the presidents of the eight standing committees of the National Assembly. Among them, the Finance Committee, whose presidency must go to an opposition group. The RN, with its 89 deputies, claims it, as the first opposition group. Except that the Nupes, in four groups, brings together 151 elected officials. If, as she promised and as is the custom, the majority does not vote, it is Eric Coquerel, designated by the union of the left to run for the post, who should win.

But. There is a “but”: the press, and in particular theOpinion, echoed a so-called secret deal between LR and RN. LR would retain one of the three posts of quaestors (those who manage the stewardship of the Assembly) against a vote for Jean-Philippe Tanguy, the RN candidate for the finance committee. Eric Coquerel, serene, do not believe it for a moment. He recalls that no LR vote should be missing for him to be beaten. Olivier Faure, the first secretary of the PS, does not believe LR capable of crossing this Rubicon: “General de Gaulle would not turn over in his grave, he would do gliding flights. »

The awaited election

It would still be necessary to return to the main object of this day: the election to the presidency of the National Assembly. The day, as we said, was going to be long: without an absolute majority, it was likely that we would have to wait for the… third round. However, as each member votes by secret ballot, one by one, in alphabetical order, it takes between an hour and a half and two hours to vote count and finally announce a result. Yaël Braun-Pivet, the candidate for Ensemble (the Macronist coalition), was of course the favorite but was not alone: ​​Annie Genevard, for LR, Fatiha Keloua Hachi, for Nupes, Nathalie Bassire, elected from Reunion, and Sébastien Chenu, from the RN, were also in the running.

The weak relative Macronist majority putting a little spice in the parliamentary work, we are not close to a conspiracy theory. Shortly before the start of the first round, a member of the Nupes claimed to have received “lots of phone calls from Olivier Véran” (now Minister for Relations with Parliament) to ensure that the Nupes would not vote at the last moment for candidate LR and thus beat the Macronist candidate in the third round. During the counting of the first round, a new rumor: Sébastien Chenu would withdraw in the second round (because here, everyone can stay if he or she wants to). Journalists do the accounts, calculators in hand: with one or two votes, there could therefore be an election in the second round. Does the RN want to go home earlier, or embarrass the future president, elected thanks to the abstention of the far right?

The expected result

Sébastien Chenu withdrew and offered a faster-than-expected election to Yaël Braun Pivet, elected with 242 votes in the second round, against 144 for the Nupes candidate (slightly less than the 151 votes of the four groups of union of the left). Yaël Braun-Pivet, the first woman to hold this position in France, did not hesitate to highlight the event in her very personal speech, and in front of her daughter in tears in the audience. On a political level, the deputy for Yvelines therefore owes her election at least in part to the abstention of the RN. It should also be noted that this election has not (yet) made it possible to identify the government’s possible leeway. In the first round, Yaël Braun-Pivet collected the 238 votes more or less expected, four more in the second round. As an opening, we do better. Appointment is already made for Wednesday, to see if the atmosphere will be more concordant for the election of the office of the Assembly.

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