As part of a transpartisan bill on the “status of local elected officials”, 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 future 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.
A favorable government
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.
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. In three days of examination of this senatorial text, parliamentarians were able to measure certain differences with the government. The latter generally supports the work carried out against the vocations crisis with a view to the 2026 municipal elections, but he opposed several proposals.
An “extremely reasonable” proposal
Thus, the Minister for Communities, Dominique Faure, did not approve a measure to increase the pensions of local elected officials by one quarter per full mandate, which would be “an additional burden and could be misunderstood”.
Many benches in the hemicycle expressed their annoyance, including within the Macronist group: 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.