2023-10-04 11:00:19
The president of the Socialist group in the National Assembly, Boris Vallaud, and the first secretary of the Socialist Party, Olivier Faure, at Matignon, in Paris, September 14, 2023. JULIEN MUGUET FOR “LE MONDE”
How can we take the floor again on immigration, and weigh in on the debates when the government is looking for a way through with the Republicans (LR), rather than with the left? This question is giving the New Ecological and Social Popular Union (Nupes) a hard time, a few months before the arrival of the immigration bill in the National Assembly. “We have a cultural battle to fight. Public debate is swallowed up by the far right and the right »defends the environmentalist deputy (Yvelines) Benjamin Lucas, responsible for defending his group’s position on this text. “The left cannot leave scattered on this issue”adds the communist deputy for Hauts-de-Seine Elsa Faucillon, inviting her partners to “looking for an offensive narrative, rather than respectability”.
Also read the interview: Article reserved for our subscribers Boris Vallaud: “The French are in favor of the regularization of foreigners through work”
To counterbalance, Nupes must still succeed in tuning its violins on a subject which traditionally makes it uncomfortable. Until then silent, the Socialist Party (PS) adopted, on Tuesday October 3, in the national office, the political line which will serve as a compass for its positions in the National Assembly. The equation was not simple: it was a question of putting an end to the trials of angelism, without giving the impression of giving in to the right, while finding an original path in the face of “at the same time” by Emmanuel Macron. The government’s bill includes both a repressive component aimed at facilitating the expulsions of delinquent foreigners, and a so-called “social” component for the regularization of undocumented immigrants working in economic sectors in tension.
The PS text was therefore impatiently awaited by the elected officials of La France insoumise (LFI). The “rebellious” deputy for Loire-Atlantique Andy Kerbrat wanted, for example, to know if the rose party was going to break with the “Vallsist” line based on the diptych “firmness and humanity” which prevailed under the five-year term of François Hollande. The former Minister of the Interior, Manuel Valls, had, on the one hand, wanted to put an end to Nicolas Sarkozy’s “policy of numbers” applied to the arrests of foreigners in an irregular situation, by implementing a circular listing criteria regularization. On the other hand, he continued to advocate “maximum distance”.
Divergent strategies
A short decade later, the socialists seem ready to settle – at least in part – this legacy. At the heart of their story, they emphasize the regularization of all undocumented workers, a measure which had not been implemented under the mandate of the former socialist president. “Work is perhaps the most understandable entry point for the French”defends the leader of the socialist deputies, Boris Vallaud, who intends in this way to find an echo in public opinion seduced by the repressive rhetoric of the right and the extreme right.
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