“We will not vote on the text of the bill [on immigration] as it was adopted by the law committee” of the National Assembly, warned Wednesday, December 6, the president of the Les Républicains (LR) party. , Eric Ciotti, five days before his examination in the hemicycle.
“I say it very clearly: we will not be complicit in this announced failure,” continued the MP for Alpes-Maritimes during a press conference at the Paris headquarters of his party, pointing out “a cheap text” , “without ambition” and “which will ultimately solve nothing”.
Surrounded by the presidents of the LR parliamentary groups in the Senate and the National Assembly, Bruno Retailleau and Olivier Marleix, the boss of the Republicans, on the contrary, praised the version of the text as voted by the upper house in mid-November. The bill was then revised by the law committee of the National Assembly. And it is this new version which arrives on December 11 in the hemicycle of the Palais-Bourbon.
The Senate had “considerably improved and produced a text whose scope I welcomed and which marked very concrete progress, as far as we could go within the current constitutional framework,” underlined Mr. Marleix.
At the time, however, he expressed his reluctance towards this version. Asked about possible abstentions on the part of deputies from his group of 62 elected officials, he assured that he would not “reason like that”.
“At present, I do not see many deputies within the group who are ready to validate a massive regularization movement,” he explained, arguing that “if people have problems of internal consistency, they are the ones to ask.” Asked about the possible filing of a motion to reject, Mr. Marleix also evaded: “We have until 12:30 p.m. [Monday] to do it, we will see. You’ll know that at 12:15.”