The former president of the Collectivity overturned Valérie Damaseau’s first-round lead days after three councilors quit the governing group. His victory is a blow to Louis Mussington, but it also poses a question for Team Gibbs ahead of 2027: who would run Saint-Martin if the movement wins?
SAINT-MARTIN:--- Daniel Gibbs has won Saint-Martin’s seat in the French Senate from the opposition, defeating the candidate backed by Territorial Council President Louis Mussington in a dramatic second-round reversal on Sunday, September 27.
Gibbs received 13 votes to Valérie Damaseau’s 11, with one of the 25 electors abstaining. Damaseau had led the first round 11–6. Gibbs gained seven votes between ballots while Damaseau gained none.
The defeat came at a revealing moment for Mussington’s majority. Two days before the Senate vote, territorial councilors Raphaël Sanchez, Martine Beldor and Valérie Fonrose announced that they were leaving his governing group to continue their mandates as independents. Fonrose had already disputed the portrayal of Damaseau as the choice of a united majority, saying the endorsement was neither unanimous nor collectively decided.
Damaseau was Mussington’s preferred candidate. She entered Sunday’s first round ahead, yet the governing camp could not deliver the additional support she needed when the contest narrowed to two names. The secret ballot does not reveal who voted for Gibbs, and the councilors’ departure does not establish how any individual voted. The political result is clear: Mussington’s candidate lost to the man he replaced as president of the Collectivity.
Gibbs, a former deputy for Saint-Barthélemy and Saint-Martin, served as president of the Collectivity from 2017 to 2022. Since losing that office to Mussington, he has sat in territorial opposition. His Senate victory returns him to national office and gives Team Gibbs a prominent voice in Paris ahead of the next local election.
Sunday’s result also ended incumbent Senator Annick Pétrus’s attempt to secure a second term. Pétrus received three votes in the first round and did not file to stand in the second. She served as a vice-president under Gibbs and won the Senate seat in 2020 while part of his majority, then joined Mussington’s electoral list in 2022. This time, Mussington backed Damaseau.
Only Gibbs and Damaseau contested the second round. Pétrus, Sanchez, Bernadette Venthou-Dumaine and Tristan Choppin Haudry de Janvry did not file after the first ballot. The race that began with six candidates ended in a direct contest between Mussington’s preferred candidate and his predecessor.
A victory with a succession question
Gibbs’s comeback does not mean he can simply retake the presidency of the Collectivity if Team Gibbs wins the 2027 territorial election. French electoral law makes a Senate mandate incompatible with serving as president or vice-president of Saint-Martin’s Territorial Council, or as a member of its executive. He could remain an ordinary territorial councilor, but he could not hold the Senate seat and the presidency at the same time.
That puts a consequential question to Team Gibbs, the movement that contested previous territorial elections as Team Gibbs 2017 and Team Gibbs 2022: Who will head its 2027 list, and who will put forward to govern if it wins?
Voters elect territorial councilors; the newly elected council then elects its president. Gibbs may remain the movement’s best-known figure and campaign for its return to power. But if he intends to keep his Senate mandate, Team Gibbs needs another prospective president—and voters deserve to know who that person is before they are asked to return the movement to office.
Saint-Martin’s Territorial Council is due for renewal in March 2027. Mussington now faces that election after a public break by three councilors and the defeat of his Senate candidate. Gibbs enters it with a fresh victory, but also with a leadership decision his movement can no longer avoid.
