A legal void about to be filled?
The Senate, supported by the government, approved Thursday the maintenance of the income of mayors on maternity leave, correcting a blind spot in the law recently denounced by the councilor of Poitiers, as part of a text on the "status of the “elected” adopted unanimously.
The transpartisan bill, which intends to fight against the crisis of local commitment and encourage vocations with a view to the municipal elections of 2026, was supported on all benches in the hemicycle of the “chamber of territories”.
It is now transmitted to the National Assembly, where uncertainty remains over its inclusion on the agenda because a competing bill was tabled there by deputies Violette Spillebout (Renaissance) and Sébastien Jumel (PCF).
Thursday, the senators returned to the incongruity raised by Léonore Moncond'huy, the environmentalist mayor of Poitiers, who had discovered with surprise that her income would be seriously reduced during an upcoming maternity leave.
The reason: a legal void which prevents municipalities from setting up an “employer supplement” to maintain the level of remuneration of elected officials who have interrupted their professional activity.
“Maternity leave cannot cause a net loss of resources.
We must act to make the necessary feminization of local executive functions more concrete,” argued ecologist Monique de Marco.
The government, which said it was in favor of this development regarding maternity, paternity and adoption leave, therefore kept its commitment to the senators.
The latter nevertheless went further by also targeting sick leave: their system makes automatic the accumulation of daily allowances from Social Security with the continuation of the exercise of the mandate, unless otherwise medically advised.
Until then, the doctor's agreement was necessary, which may have caused certain elected officials to have to reimburse their daily allowances if they continued their activities.
Divergences
In three days of examination of this senatorial text, parliamentarians were able to measure certain differences with the government, even if this issue of the “status of the elected official” is one of the projects carried out by Prime Minister Gabriel Attal.
Thus, the Minister for Communities, Dominique Faure, did not approve a measure to increase the pensions of local elected officials up to one quarter per full mandate.
Many benches in the hemicycle expressed their annoyance, including within the Macronist group where Senator Olivier Bitz defended this “extremely reasonable” proposal in the face of the “exhaustion” of elected officials.
The minister also tried, without success, to remove the doubling of "elective leave" for candidates in local elections as well as the expansion of the special grant for local elected officials (DPEL) to municipalities with 3,500 inhabitants, compared to 1,000 inhabitants currently. .
Furthermore, the government was favorable to the creation of an “Employer of local democracy” label for companies employing elected officials… Without, however, supporting the underlying tax reduction that the Senate proposed.
In a national context of budgetary restrictions, the senators still tried to defend their vision: “The Republic has no price, it has a cost”, repeated several times the centrist Françoise Gatel, who carries this text .