Immigration derangement syndrome is causing havoc on both sides of the Channel, arriving in France this week in the form of a titanic row, not a small boat. The president, Emmanuel Macron, is accused by the French left of accepting an immigration law so repressive that it has been applauded by Marine Le Pen. The leftwing politician Manon Aubry called it “the most racist law we have seen” in France. She had presumably never heard of the Vichy regime. The health minister, Aurélien Rousseau, has resigned over it.
Of what is Macron accused? Is the French president sending asylum seekers to North Korea? Building a wall along the Franco-Italian border? No. But on Tuesday night, a raft of centre-right amendments turned a much delayed and relatively anodyne government immigration bill into a laundry list of rightwing slogans.
Most of those amendments are unpleasant and pointless rather than nasty. They are impractical gestures to appeal to hard-right opinion, similar to but not as extreme as the UK government’s Rwanda policy. The automatic right to French nationality of children born in France with two foreign parents becomes slightly less automatic. It was never fully automatic before, unlike, say, in the US. A five-year delay will be imposed before some legal migrants can claim social benefits such as family and housing allowances. This is discriminatory but already applies to other social benefits introduced by leftwing governments.
Several of the changes to the bill will almost certainly be deleted by France’s constitutional watchdog, the constitutional council. Macron and his government accepted them knowing they would not stand. This was motivated by a mixture of tactical desperation and cynicism (also reminiscent of the UK).
The far-right leader, Marine Le Pen, saw her chance. After condemning the bill and the amendments as too feeble, she stood on her head and announced it was an “ideological victory” for her party. She and the other 87 Rassemblement National deputies, who opposed the law on Tuesday morning, voted for it en bloc on Tuesday evening. Her longstanding demands for “national preference” and putting “the French first” had been enshrined in law, Le Pen said. This is atmospherically true but factually a lie. Even the amended bill goes nowhere near the kind of discriminatory measures demanded by Le Pen, such as jobs reserved for French citizens and fees for foreign children attending state schools.
There was already anger at the amended bill on the left side of Macron’s centrist party and coalition. The fact that Le Pen was voting for the bill turned that anger into misery and outright revolt. Of the 251 Macron-supporting deputies, 59 – almost one in four – failed to vote for the law as copiously amended and extended by the centre-right. After Rousseau resigned, several other ministers threatened to follow him but have not yet done so.
In a television interview last night Macron attempted a perilous balancing act. He disowned parts of his own law – such as a clause that will make non-EU foreign students pay a cash deposit before they can come to France. He said that his minority government had been forced to compromise to rescue its original bill, which contained “real solutions to real problems”. He had asked the constitutional council to fillet the text of its worst excesses.
Macron’s original intention was to address legal and staffing problems that are preventing the country from blocking and deporting illegal migrants. At present, 90% of those ordered to leave never do so.
At the same time (as Macron loves to say), the government’s original bill offered easier access to residence cards for the thousands of “sans papiers” who work illegally in France at the mercy of unscrupulous employers. That law – first proposed 18 months ago – has been blocked by the left as too oppressive and by the right as too weak.
Last week, the national assembly decided by a majority of five votes out of 577 to reject it without even a debate (the left voting with the right and far right). Partly out of pique, partly out of impatient determination to push through his campaign promise, Macron ordered his government to negotiate rapid changes in a rightwing-dominated committee of both houses of the French parliament. The result was inevitable.
On Tuesday, the original bill survived more or less intact, with 40 new clauses enshrining rightwing campaigning points (such as migration quotas and removing the French citizenship of dual nationals guilty of serious crimes).
In one sense, that was a great victory for Macron. Both of his main 2022 campaign promises – reform of pension rights and immigration law – have been achieved in 18 months despite his lack of parliamentary majority. But at what price? The pension reform caused months of strikes and social unrest. And now the immigration reform has split his own centrist alliance and handed a cheap PR victory to Le Pen – and also to the left.
The rhetorically exaggerated leftwing reactions to the amended bill are political-tactical rather than moral-sincere. They will have a lasting effect all the same, even if the law is cut back to something like its original shape. The Macron and “sensible centrist” brands have been damaged.
He is barred by the constitution from running for a third term in 2027. His centrist successor, whoever that may be, will find it harder to make the victorious appeal that Macron made to leftwing voters in the second round runoff in 2017 and 2022: “Vote for me to block the far right.”
John Lichfield is a journalist based in France since 1997. He is the author of Our Man in Paris
