Chronic. Marine Le Pen smiles, posts videos of her cats on TikTok, caresses the voter with sweet words like « concorde » Where “national union”, and smiled again. Who, in such a setting of serenity, would be suspicious enough, mean-spirited enough, to read in detail the forty-six indigestible pages of his project “Controlling immigration”? However, it is necessary to go through this to understand one of the stakes of the presidential election: the “gentleness” strategy of the candidate of the National Rally (RN) masks a brutal project of destruction of the institutions of the Republic, of rupture with the universalist ideals of the French Revolution, but also of divorce from the European Union.
This time, M.me Le Pen is not running into the wall: no explicit promise of “Frexit” or a break with the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), but a spectacular hold-up on the Constitution of the Ve A republic that would achieve, neither seen nor known, the same result. Constitutionalist Dominique Rousseau denounces “a kind of coup d’etat”. That’s right, with the particularity that the Republic would be emptied of its meaning by the French people themselves, via a referendum. Not even need for demonizing label – “far right” – to denounce this legal pronunciamiento which would tip France into Hungarian-style illiberalism.
The Constitution, a fine clockwork mechanism, has nothing untouchable, as evidenced by the revisions adopted since 1958. But it is a radical rewriting that the twenty-three pages of the “referendum bill” of Marine The pen. Central objective: to prevent immigration from “modify the composition and identity of the French people”. Mind-blowing tools: erecting discrimination and xenophobia into constitutional principles opening up the possibility of prohibiting private employment, housing, social assistance to foreigners; drastically restrict the right to asylum by making it impossible to exercise on French territory; abolish jus soli – French nationality could no longer be acquired by birth in France, but only by filiation (droit du sang).
counter-revolution
This counter-revolution supposes both violating the Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1789, which enshrines the principle of the equality of all before the law, the preamble to the 1946 Constitution inspired by the victory over Nazism, according to which “No one can be wronged, in his work or employment, because of his origins” and the Gaullist Constitution of 1958, which incorporates the two previous texts. The Lepenist project also breaks with the constitutional principle that “Any man persecuted because of his action in favor of freedom has the right of asylum in the territories of the Republic”. As for the abolition of jus soli, it banishes a basic republican principle, inherited from the Old Regime but codified in a stable manner since 1889, according to which nationality is acquired through education in France. Even Vichy did not touch it.
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