Saint-Denis meetings: a referendum on immigration “no longer on the agenda”

2023-11-17 22:50:38

This is no longer “on the agenda”. While the second “Saint-Denis meetings” took place this Friday, the question of a possible referendum on immigration was discussed, according to the participants of this meeting. The Les Républicains party, whose boss Éric Ciotti had decided to boycott this meeting, demanded it.

The latter “will not take place”, assured the national secretary of Europe Ecologie-Les Verts, Marine Tondelier, at the end of the meeting with Emmanuel Macron. “A consensus emerged around the table on the fact that it seemed complicated to expand the possibility of holding referendums on societal subjects such as immigration,” noted Fabien Roussel, national secretary of the Communist Party.

“I am leaving with great satisfaction, immense satisfaction, that there will be no referendum on immigration,” added Marine Tondelier. She noted that the leader of the National Rally Jordan Bardella “was all alone during this meeting” to defend the idea of ​​this referendum. “It’s not nice of Eric Ciotti to have left him alone when it was his idea,” she added, referring to the absence of the Republican boss on Friday.

“The president is not currently considering this possibility,” confirmed Jordan Bardella. “I was today in Saint-Denis the only spokesperson for those who want to control immigration,” he said.

” All that for this ! »reacts Ciotti

Éric Ciotti quickly reacted from a distance: “as I predicted, today’s Saint-Denis meetings led to nothing. The President even renounces the idea of ​​a referendum on immigration. All that for this ! “. He called on the presidential majority to vote in favor of a bill from his party “to stop mass immigration”, on the Assembly’s agenda on December 7.

The secretary general of Renaissance, Stéphane Séjourné, stressed that the question asked on Friday by Emmanuel Macron “was not to know whether or not we were holding a referendum on immigration”. “It was a very concrete proposal (…) to broaden the scope of the Article 11 referendum on which he consulted all political parties.”

According to the Macronist leader, “there is no majority” either on the objective “of extending the citizens’ initiative referendum, with the lowering of the thresholds” to be able to organize it.