With a monthly allowance of 7,493 euros gross per month, deputies are still at the top of the income scale but have experienced a dropout since the 2000s.
MPs are still at the top of the income scale, but they have been falling since the 2000s. They are now part of the best paid 3% of French people, whereas they belonged to the most advantaged 1% there is in his twenties, according to a study.
Deputies as senators receive a monthly allowance of 7493 euros gross per month, aligned with the treatment of very high officials of the Council of State. This remuneration allows “any citizen, whatever his social condition, to be able to exercise a mandate”.
It is “the price of independence and the dignity of the function”, underlines the site of theNational Assembly.
Since its introduction in 1789, “the parliamentary allowance has been the object of fierce and regular criticism”, recall the sociologist Etienne Ollion and the jurist Éric Buge in the latest issue of the review The annals and in a note from the Public Policy Institute published this week.
They have endeavored to estimate since 1914 the amount of the “real allowance” of the deputies, by deducting the expenses related to the mandate (parliamentary permanence, collaborators…). During the 20th century, this real level reached between 3 and 5 times the average worker’s wage.
A “significant drop” from the 2000s
And between 1945 and the end of the 1990s, the parliamentary allowance placed deputies among the 1% of French people with the highest incomes.
In detail, the revaluations of the point of the civil service increased this remuneration until the 1960s. Then another mechanism was triggered: the Assembly gradually took charge of costs such as the remuneration of employees, travel and computer costs. This indirectly increased the real income of MPs.
But from the 2000s, this income experienced “a significant decline”, which pushed parliamentarians back from the rank of 1% to the rank of the 3% of the best paid French people, calculated the authors of the study. Because the remuneration is then “linked to the index point (of the civil servants) only, without the possibility of additional support for their expenses”.
In addition, the non-cumulation of mandates since 2017 has limited other sources of income. The authors make the link with the evolution of the mandate of deputy itself, which resembles “less and less a liberal profession” and more and more “a status of salaried executive”, with unemployment insurance at the end of similar mandate, a common law pension plan, as well as more stringent ethical rules.