It lasts barely more than five minutes, but a video sequence on the official site of the French presidency speaks volumes about the current plight of the French government. On it (see video below) you can see the government's official spokesman, Stéphane Le Foll, fielding questions from journalists following the weekly cabinet meeting of ministers that took place on Wednesday February 3rd. It was at this meeting that ministers were officially presented with details of the plan to strip convicted terrorists of their French nationality, part of the post-November 13th attack constitutional reform to be debated in the National Assembly from Friday February 5th.
From the start of the sequence we see an awkward Le Foll slowly drowning amid the torrent of insistent questions from journalists. At the end we witness an exasperated spokesman telling journalists not to ask any more questions and to write just what he says. “Don't write, the best solution is to write all that I've said to you, that's already a lot of things,” he says.
This clip alone tragically sums up the stalemate in this debate, if one can use that word for the painful discussion that has taken place over stripping nationality from those who commit terrorist acts. It tells us a great deal about the irritation of ministers who, like Le Foll, are hostile to this measure put forward by the president of the Republic, even though he is personally very close to President Hollande. And there are several ministers in the government who have kept silent on the matter to avoid contradicting the presidential line.
What will doubtless most strike anyone who has not followed all the daily instalments of this farce, which has been running since November 16th, is the completely esoteric nature of the video sequence. There are questions on the law, on statelessness, the 1961 convention on statelessness, about dual nationals and the preliminary draft of the law. The journalist ask questions that are precise, technical and absolutely necessary, but which are also abstruse and doubtless incomprehensible for anyone who doesn't know the issue. On the video itself Le Foll digs in his heels and gets irritated. As for the reader, listener or viewer, they only see one thing: the unbelievable absurdity of a pointless debate that ends up going around and around in circles to the point where it no longer means anything.
Let us take things in their proper order. Last week prime minister Manuel Valls went before Members of Parliament to propose a new version of the post-Paris attacks constitutional reforms that President Hollande wanted, and which he announced on November 16th. To ensure the Right backed the measures, Valls announced that people convicted of less serious terrorist offences, as well as major terrorist crimes, would be covered by the nationality-stripping measure. While to calm down his own camp on the Left, the prime minister said that the removal of nationality for French-born dual nationals – a far-right demand requested by former president Nicolas Sarkozy on the Right and taken up by President Hollande, but which has antagonised his ruling Socialist Party (PS) - was being removed and postponed for future legislation.
Some socialists were satisfied with this. With his usual loquaciousness, MP Patrick Menucci, who is overseeing the progress of the legislation for the PS group in the Assembly, loudly insisted to journalists who were waiting around after the meetings– including the current author – that it was now sorted, all was well, the socialists were happy and could vote for it.
A few journalists, however, assured him that in reality it changed nothing. And that as France does not want to create stateless people, which would put it in contradiction with international conventions, only dual nationals would in practice be targeted by the measure as the others, convicted terrorists with just one nationality, would “only” see their rights as a citizen removed. But Mennucci and his colleagues stuck to their position.
For a brief moment, the government had managed to trick some of its supporters. Then a dispatch from the news agency Agence France-Press (AFP) dropped, which contained the wording of the draft legislation. It stated that the removal of nationality could not be applied “if it results in making the convicted person stateless”.
So suddenly the Socialist Party was on the warpath. “What? They've lied to us!” was the cry. During a socialist group meeting on Tuesday Patrick Mennucci indeed found out that everything wasn't what it had seemed and threatened to resign from his position overseeing the legislation if dual nationals alone were targeted in this way. Meanwhile on the Parliamentary TV channel the leader of the PS group in the National Assembly, Bruno Le Roux, who is close to François Hollande, tried his best to hold things together. “There still needs to be more detail on dual nationality because even if the word no longer appears, and I'm glad about that, either in the Constitution or the laws putting it into practice, the fact that there is a reference to statelessness leads to a debate on dual nationality,” he said.
Then last Wednesday, February 3rd, the text of the law was presented to the weekly ministerial cabinet meeting at the Elysée. Officially, nothing had changed. Yet reading between the lines we learnt that in the space of a few hours the government had found a very cunning new trick they hoped would get their own MPs back on board. The government will ratify the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness – which France has not done up to now – but people who are deprived of all nationality in the future and effectively made stateless will be done so under the convention's exceptional clauses which allow for a derogation where someone has behaved in a way that is “seriously prejudicial to the vital interests of the State”. Clever thinking. So here we have arrived at a much-vaunted outcome which satisfies no one, making the Left unhappy and the Right reluctant to support it; for it creates stateless people, and does not just target dual nationals.
Is that quite clear? No? Well, that is only to be expected. This whole affair has gone beyond the stage of reason, of rational exchanges of different points of view and of genuine debate. It has become a nameless swamp, Hollande's and Valls's big problem, their final millstone.
Yet when on November 16th, three days after the bloodiest attacks on French soil since World War II, François Hollande announced at a special Congress of Parliament at Versailles the possibility of stripping French-born dual nationals of their nationality, the president thought he had pulled off a brilliant tactical coup. He was going to trap the Right! To force them to vote for a measure that a large number of people in his own ranks had always called for. He was going to get his constitutional change, which would also see the state of emergency written into the constitution, voted through amid splendid unanimity that would make him seem like the father of the nation protecting the country. At the time some marvelled at the tactical genius of this political chameleon, this “King of Strategy” who, yes, may have had a reputation for making compromises, but who was, even so, very strong...
Six weeks later we can all witness the power of this formidable Hollande genius for ourselves. Entire swathes of the Right are baulking at the idea of voting for the measure, some because they do not want to do the president any favours, some because they consider the reform to be pointless, even dangerous. As for socialist MPs, they can see the Titanic that is the constitutional reform heading straight for the iceberg where it risks being dashed to pieces.
Meanwhile Christiane Taubira, the emblematic justice minister for the first four years of the Hollande presidency, resigned with a flourish over this reform. It has to be admitted that in the book that she has just published, in which she devotes dozens of pages to the subject, Taubira saw all this coming. On the issue of stripping someone of their nationality the former minister writes: “That would an illustration of the difference between egalitarianism and equality. Where equality raises up by extending to everyone the rights and freedoms reserved for some, egalitarianism levels down, and for the worst.” And is this the final word in the discussion about the 1961 convention? “Would you not have to have no respect for your sense of ethics, no consideration for your own commitments, no concern for your reputation, no pride in your own self, to turn this into an occasion for casuistry and to hide behind a legal loophole to justify dodging the moral and political issues?”
This, then, is what it has come to. On Friday February 5th, the National Assembly steps into this minefield, and the issue will grab media attention for days to come. Yet, all the while, unemployment continues to rise and the “social, territorial and ethnic” apartheid that Manuel Valls spoke about after the Charlie Hebdo and Jewish supermarket attacks in January 2015 is as great as ever; François Hollande's five-year term of office already seems like ancient history even though it is not yet over. In the end we journalists are the only ones left still taking an interest in the stirrings of a zombie government shut away inside its own bubble. We are there to describe to the bitter end how this government has ultimately stripped itself of its own political identity.
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter