Paris, Dec 19 (EFE).- The French government announced Tuesday that it had reached an agreement with the conservative The Republicans (LR) party to pass a toughened version of an immigration law that will now be put to a vote in the National Assembly.
Even if it is not “perfect,” Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin told the press after the agreement was reached, “we are happy that we have this text to protect the people of France.”
Last week, the lower house had refused to debate another version of the text, which the left considered too harsh and the right too permissive.
The two sides had clashed for a week on issues such as delaying access to social benefits for immigrants or medical assistance for undocumented people, which will finally be reformed separately from this law.
The ruling Renaissance party, a centrist party that does not have an absolute majority to push initiatives on its own since 2022, returned to the more conservative version of the bill that had emerged from the Senate (with a conservative majority) and sought an agreement with the LR.
“It’s a satisfaction, of course. We wanted a clear, firm, powerful, courageous text on immigration,” said the president of the LR,, Eric Ciotti.
Ciotti, who has argued that the French social model must be made “less attractive” because France cannot assimilate so many foreign arrivals, defended this agreement as a victory for LR, while the government tried to reassure the public about the concessions it had made to the right.
However, the far right, led by Marine Le Pen, was quick to celebrate an “ideological victory”, claiming that the project somehow enshrined its principle of “national preference” into law.
Le Pen announced that her bloc would vote in favor of the bill in the Assembly.
The left, on the other hand, spared no qualifiers to criticize this text, which they branded as xenophobic.
“We are in a terrifying moment,” said Olivier Faure, first secretary of the French Socialist Party, while Mathilde Panot, leader of the deputy bloc of La France Insoumise (LFI), considered that it is the “harshest” text in history on immigration. EFE
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