The sequence summarizes how the two camps still in the running for the presidential election clashed in the campaign over immigration. On the set of BFM-TV, Wednesday April 13, the president of the National Rally (RN), Jordan Bardella, and the Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, cross swords on various subjects, pensions and purchasing power particularly.
It’s time to talk about immigration. Mr. Bardella is on the offensive. “France is not a social counter”elle “not a hotel”elle “is not intended to accommodate everyone”, he hammers. To re-elect Emmanuel Macron would be to sign for “five more years of migratory submergence”. It declines Marine Le Pen’s major proposals in this area: reserving family allowances for the French, conditioning access to active solidarity income (RSA) on five years of work in France, ensuring national priority access to social housing and employment, abolish state medical aid (AME), only process asylum applications when they are submitted to French consulates and embassies in countries of origin.
Jordan Bardella is talkative. Facing him, Gérald Darmanin is all in restraint and measure. “Your project is deeply unfair”he said to his rival. “There is no invasion of foreigners in France”, he ponders again. No promise is made by the minister. He barely defends his record in terms of deportations to the border. Isn’t there a more complicated balancing act than having to spare “at the same time” your left and your right in front of the RN?
“It’s a slippery subject where Emmanuel Macron can only lose, so the less he talks about it, the better”analysis Hillel Rapoport, economist at Paris-I University and the Paris School of Economics, and author of Rethinking immigration in France. An economic point of view (Rue d’Ulm, 2018). Difficult to compete with the program of the RN in the matter, bloated but which does not remain about it less impractical in several respects. Starting with Marine Le Pen’s commitment to organise, as soon as she is elected, a referendum on a draft law revising the Constitution to include the “mastery” of immigration, the “national priority” and the primacy of national law over international and European law. “Marine Le Pen cannot modify the Constitution by referendum or it would be a constitutional coup”emphasizes Serge Slama, professor of public law at the University of Grenoble-Alpes and member of the Center for Legal Research.
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