2023-12-20 17:25:24
Were the votes of the National Rally (RN) decisive in the adoption of the immigration bill? Tuesday evening, after several weeks of twists and turns, the deputies, like the senators a few hours before them, voted in favor of the text, a version revised by the joint committee (CMP). In detail, 349 elected officials voted “for”, 186 “against”, 38 abstained and four did not participate.
At the end of the vote, the Minister of the Interior Gérald Darmanin was quick to point out that the text was voted on “without the votes of the RN”, insisting that “the majority was large and, even if we remove the votes of the National Rally, very broad”. Same story with Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne, who repeated on France Inter on Wednesday morning that the bill “was passed without the votes of the RN”, believing that the “maneuver” of the far-right party had failed and that the presidential camp had “come together”. A message repeated by Olivier Véran, government spokesperson, this Wednesday noon.
On the opposition side, however, the calculations are different. To the left, Olivier Faure (PS) et Jean-Luc Mélenchon (LFI) estimated that without the votes of Jordan Bardella’s party, the text would not have passed. “There is no need to have studied polytechnics to know that without the vote of the National Rally, the text would not have been adopted,” he said. PS deputy Jérôme Guedj at the microphone of TF1. The RN congratulated itself on having had a decisive role in the adoption of the bill, Marine Le Pen spoke of an “ideological victory”.
Everyone has their own calculations… and their reading
What is it really ? It is a mathematical question but also one of interpretation. In total, the 88 RN deputies voted in favor of the text. In the event that everyone had abstained, the score would then have been 261 votes “for” and 186 votes “against”. The text would therefore still have been adopted since the absolute majority would have been obtained. This is the hypothesis defended by the presidential camp to justify the non-influence of the RN votes.
Conversely, the oppositions on the left and the far right believe that the bill would have been rejected if all RN deputies had voted “against”. In this hypothesis, the score would then have been 261 “for” and 274 “against”, which would effectively have swung the vote.
If we had voted against this text, it would not have passed.
The national priority is enshrined in law and our ideological victory is TOTAL!
The next step in the fight against migratory chaos will be the victory of Marine Le Pen in 2027.#LoiImmigration pic.twitter.com/JYZrYFkkzH
— Laure Lavalette (@LaureLavalette) December 19, 2023
But Élisabeth Borne responds with another hypothesis: if the RN had voted “against” the text, then deputies from the majority would have joined the “for” camp, as she explained this Tuesday morning on France Inter. “A certain number of our deputies were embarrassed that the RN came to vote on this text,” she recalled.
Beyond arithmetic, everything actually depends on the ideological reading of the election results. The government and the presidential majority, accused by the left-wing opposition of having allowed a text to pass which bears too much of the mark of the extreme right, preferred to hail a success. It must be said that the stakes were high: Emmanuel Macron assured, during a meeting at the Élysée before the vote, that if the law was adopted thanks to the votes of the RN, he would have requested a second deliberation in Parliament.
#votes #vote #Immigration #law #side #takes #stock