François Patriat poses next to a Charolais at the 2020 Agricultural Show -

Ludovic Marin / POOL / AFP

Côte-d'Or senator François Patriat, close to Emmanuel Macron, was re-elected on Thursday as president of the LREM group, which becomes the Rassemblement des Démocrates, Progressistes et Indépendants (RDPI), we learned in a press release on Thursday.

This change of name was decided "unanimously" and aims "to mark the enlargement and the gathering of the presidential majority in the Senate".

The renamed group claims “24 senators”, one more than before the senatorial elections on Sunday (10 seats of the group out of 23 were renewable).

The two ministers Sébastien Lecornu and Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne elected on Sunday appear in the photo posted by the group at the end of its meeting, but they will not sit in the Senate as long as they are members of the government.

Laborious campaign

At 77, François Patriat, who managed to keep his seat on Sunday in Côte-d'Or at the cost of a laborious campaign, was re-elected president of the group.

The former socialist was in internal competition with the senator from Paris and spokesperson for the LREM group, Julien Bargeton.

Name change also on the left: the PS group (Socialist and Republican) becomes the Socialist, Ecologist and Republican group.

"This development reflects the omnipresence of this concern in the work and reflections of the group," said the group in a press release, two days after the creation of an eighth group in the Senate, the Ecologist, Solidarity and Territories group.

A single woman leading a group

Senator Claude Malhure from Allier has also been reappointed at the head of his group Les Indépendants.

This group, component of the right-wing senatorial majority with LR and the centrist group, had 12 senators on Thursday, including two newly elected Vanina Paoli-Gagin (Aube) and Pierre-Jean Verzelen (Aisne).

On Wednesday evening, Jean-Claude Requier was re-elected president of the RDSE group with a radical majority, which has 15 senators including three newly elected, Bernard Fialaire (Rhône), Christian Bilhac (Hérault) and André Guiol (Var).

With 14 renewable seats out of 24 and the loss of two elected environmentalists who have joined the new green group, this historic group has felt the wind of the ball.

It takes 10 elected officials to form a group in the Senate.

All the groups now have their president: Bruno Retailleau (LR), Hervé Marseille (centrist), Patrick Kanner (PS) and Eliane Assassi (CRCE with a communist majority) were renewed on Tuesday or Wednesday.

Guillaume Gontard was named president of the environmental group on Tuesday.

Eliane Assassi remains the only woman president of a political group in the Senate.

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