The French president, Emmanuel Macron, has tried this Wednesday to quell the fire caused by the approval of the immigration law, which the Assembly validated on Tuesday with the votes of the right and the extreme right of Marine Le Pen and which many Macronists consider too hard The processing of it has opened cracks within the Government and has caused the resignation of the Minister of Health.
The law has opened a political crisis in the country and Macron addressed the French this afternoon in an interview in which he tried to defend the law and, at the same time, disassociate it from the postulates of the extreme right. He is accused of having shaped her to the point of having gained the support of his greatest rival.
“To form a bloc against the extreme right is not to take up their ideas. There are none in the text. I have confronted Mrs. Le Pen twice (…). She was in favor of the abolition of state medical aid and in this text we preserve it,” he said.
Macron has said that “there is an immigration problem” in France, but the country “is not overwhelmed” and “remains a welcoming country.” Now it will be the Constitutional Council that will have to evaluate the package and review some of the measures, which it itself considers to be at the limit. “I will present the law to the Constitutional Council because I believe that there are provisions that are not in accordance with our Constitution,” he said.
The Prime Minister, Elisabeth Borne, already acknowledged in the morning that the Constitutional Court could review some of the articles agreed upon by the Government itself with the Republicans. One of its leaders, Bruno Retailleau, has urged Macron to respect Parliament’s decision. “Everything seems to indicate that Emmanuel Macron is doing everything possible not to apply the Immigration Law.”
The president has said he understands the decision of the Minister of Health, Aurélien Rousseau, who has presented his resignation, but also that of “many deputies of the presidential majority who have voted for a law that was not what they wanted on all points, but that they considered it to be good for the country,” he said in his speech on France 5.
The text was agreed upon with the right-wing Republicans, who control the Senate and took over the debate. The norm contains some measures that, for some deputies of the presidential majority, are red lines that violate the values of Macronism, which boasted of being neither left nor right.
Government spokesman Olivier Véran acknowledged that the law is not perfect, but it is not “a disgrace” either, and denied that there is a rout of ministers. Some departments of the country did rebel and assure that they are not going to apply some of the measures, which they consider violate the principle of equality.
The Government had initially presented a more balanced project, to satisfy the left and the right, but since it does not have a majority in the Assembly, it needed the support of the latter to carry out the law. He negotiated the text with the Republicans, but what he did not expect was the poisoned gift from Marine Le Pen, whose party finally voted in favor. In his speech, Macron criticized this maneuver. Le Pen emerges the winner of this crisis and she herself has claimed an ideological victory. With her abstention the law would have passed, but not with the votes against it.