Gabriel Amard, first LFI elected to the Senate, enters the Luxembourg Palace

This is the new face of the Insoumis at the Luxembourg Palace. Elected to the Senate on Sunday to everyone's surprise, the Rhône deputy Gabriel Amard is the first from LFI to enter the upper house of Parliament.

This rather discreet 59-year-old man, little known to the general public, has been elected to the National Assembly since 2022. But he has not completely adopted the style of confrontation dear to many LFI deputies. “It’s not the most virulent,” observes an elected official from the Rhône.

Like an echo of Mélenchon’s years in the Senate

Gabriel Amard has been, since 2016, the husband of the daughter of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, herself an employee of the radical left movement. His arrival in the Senate resonates with the nearly nineteen years that his father-in-law spent in the upper house of Parliament, when he was in the PS. “It’s a wink from history, but I’m not into fetishism,” said Gabriel Amard in Libération before the senatorial elections. Sunday evening, he saw “a wave announcing the victory of Jean-Luc Mélenchon” in the presidential election.

The Insoumis, for fear of accusations of nepotism, do not like to talk about their family ties. “His private life has no relation to his designation,” asserted an LFI executive when Gabriel Amard was named head of the list for these elections. They rather highlight his long CV as a local elected official in Essonne: deputy mayor of Longjumeau (1989-1995), mayor of Viry-Châtillon (1995-2006) or even regional councilor of Île-de-France (1998-2001).

An a priori coherent path to sitting in the Senate, the “chamber of territories”, which LFI also intends to eliminate. “Through his experience as mayor and as an elected representative of local authorities, he will be able to best represent all the diversity of the Rhône territories,” praises the rebellious Rhône MP Anaïs Belouassa-Cherifi.

A specialist in water issues

“He is quite active but he is very badly seen by elected officials, he corporals them a little. And besides, he almost lost in the 2024 legislative elections against the former mayor of Villeurbanne: in my opinion that is where his desire to go to the Senate comes from,” squeaks on the other hand another left-wing elected official from the Rhône. In 2024 he was indeed narrowly re-elected in the sixth constituency of Rhône, with 50.57% of the votes.

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In the newspaper Le Monde, in 2019, Gabriel Amard described himself as the son of an “anticlerical Catholic mother, of Italian origin” and a father “Jewish by birth, Freemason, secular who had broken with religion at 13”. A firm opponent of bullfighting and an avowed vegetarian, this author of several works on the issue of water has become one of the specialists on this topic within the rebellious group. It is he who, with MP Claire Lejeune, is responsible for the division of “ecoregions”, this project to reorganize the regions of France around watersheds, for the presidential election.