Since his centre-right party lost its absolute majority in parliament in general elections last year, Emmanuel Macron and his government have been forced into attempting political alliances to get draft legislation through the lower house, the National Assembly.
Earlier this year such attempts spectacularly failed with the bill to overhaul the pensions system, one of the flagship reforms of Macron’s second and final term in office, when an alliance with the conservative Les Républicains (LR) party broke down at the last minute.
That led to the government forcing through the legislation, which included raising the minimum age for retirement on full pension rights from 62 to 64, without a vote in the chamber and by decree, using a controversial article of the constitution, called “the 49-3”, which caused outcry across opposition benches as well as much of the public.
Macron faces the same challenge with delayed draft legislation on a reform of immigration laws, another of the president’s major projects. The issue of immigration – or rather, reducing immigration – has for long been a political fixation in France, and is regularly stirred by the far-right Rassemblement National (RN) party (the former Front National), the largest single opposition party in parliament, and the LR conservatives.
The final details of the long-awaited bill, officially on “asylum and immigration” and which hardline interior minister Gérald Darmanin has summarised as “being nasty with those who are nasty, and nice to those who are nice”, remain unclear. Darmanin has made no secret of his ambition to run for president after Macron’s term ends in 2027.
Originally planned to be put before parliament in the spring, the bill was withdrawn to allow for further tuning in the hope of gaining full support both from Members of Parliament (MPs) from Macron’s party Renaissance, and also, crucially, from the conservatives in order to win a parliamentary vote, which would avoid using the controversial article 49-3.
In the first outlines, presented to ministers in January by Darmanin and labour minister Olivier Dussopt, it broadly aims to crack down on the numbers entering France by beefing up border controls and tightening the criteria for entry and residence, to reduce the number of appeals allowed to rejected asylum seekers, to significantly speed up the currently slow enactment of deportation orders, and to ease the process of expelling foreign nationals convicted of certain types of crimes.
But the bill, in its still provisional form, also contains an Article 3 which would allow immigrants living and working in France illegally to be given the opportunity of regularising their situation if they work in sectors which are short of labour. That proposition has been met with sharp opposition from the Right, and the conservative LR party has made clear that it will not vote for the proposed legislation if Article 3 remains. In the event that the government cannot find a majority of MPs to support the bill – and to do so depends on LR – the prospect of it again using the 49-3 to force it through to promulgation without parliamentary approval looms large.
There are mounting concerns among Macron’s own Renaissance party that Article 3 of the draft legislation will be dropped under the pressure from the Right. On Tuesday, 35 parliamentarians, made up of MPs and senators, including ten from Renaissance, co-signed an open letter published in French daily Libération demanding that the bill, in its final form, includes the allowance for the regularisation of undocumented immigrant workers to gain full legal status if they work in understaffed métiers en tension. “Without them,” the co-signatories said, “these sectors and entire swathes of our country would not be able to function.” The sectors short of labour include the construction industry, the hotel and restaurant trade, cleaning services, goods handling, nursing and home help.
The appeal was given a front page splash by Libération along with a group photo of five of the leading co-signatories; two Renaissance party MPs, Sacha Houlié and Stella Dupont, Communist Party (PCF) leader and MP Fabien Roussel, EELV green party MP Julien Bayou and Socialist Party (PS) senator Marie-Pierre de La Gontrie. MPs from the centre-right MoDem party, which is an ally of Renaissance, and members of the small centrist group Liot also leant their support to the campaign.
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Houlié is a former socialist who joined Macron’s movement as of the latter’s first presidential bid in 2016, and who currently chairs the National Assembly’s laws committee. His move to convince the government to keep the bill’s controversial regularisation article follows consultations earlier this year with Pacal Brice, a former head of the French Office for the Protection of Refugees and the Stateless (OFPRA), a public body, and that of Marilyne Poulain, formerly the head of the militant CGT union’s programme against clandestine employment, and who is now an equal opportunities prefect for the north-east Bas-Rhin département (county).
A number of associations involved in providing assistance to migrants in France, and also some employers’ associations (although not the Medef, the largest among them) have come out in support of what some in Macron’s camp call the “left leg” of the immigration bill. Article 3 in fact includes quite restrictive previsions. It stipulates that a candidate for regularisation must have already been employed (illegally) “for at least eight months” in a job in one of the understaffed sectors and in a geographical region “characterised by recruitment difficulties”. Furthermore, if an individual meets those criteria, the residence permit they are entitled to would be valid for just one year.
Meanwhile, the exact date for when the draft legislation is to begin its passage through parliament has still not been announced. According to the Macron camp, the delay and prevarication is down to the attitude of the LR party, whose group leaders in the senate and the National Assembly, respectively Bruno Retailleau and Olivier Marleix, have firmly made clear they will not back the bill as long as Article 3 remains. However, that did not deter Macron, at the end of August, from giving his interior minister the delicate mission of finding a compromise between Houlié and Gérard Larcher, the conservative president of the Senate.
“Let them leave Article 3, that’ll help things for voting against the bill,” commented one leading conservative MP, speaking on condition his name is withheld, and who believes however that the article will have disappeared by the time it reaches parliament. “If Darmanin tells himself his presidential chances are at stake with this bill, he couldn’t care less about the opinions of Sacha Houlié or [editor’s note, Renaissance MP and speaker of the National Assembly in favour of article 3] Yaël Braun-Pivet.”
Aside from the cross-party appeal in Libération this week, those most concerned by the outcome of the wrangling, the undocumented immigrant workers, have little by little disappeared from focus amid the divisions and tension within Macron’s party and within government.
On the one side is interior minister Gérald Darmanin, keen to win a vote for the bill in parliament. His credibility – and therefore his future presidential bid – is at stake, and he would regard a decision by the executive to force the legislation through without parliamentary approval, using the 49-3 powers, as a snub towards his ambitions.
On the other is Sacha Houlié, who has gained support from within his party from those who still believe in Macron’s often parodied “en même temps” policy-making manner of championing one thing and offsetting it with another. According to the open letter in Libération, Houlié even envisages adding two measures to article 3 which would ease the bureaucratic process for obtaining residence permits. He believes a section of public opinion would be in favour of a “firm and humane” immigration law imposed by a “popular 49-3” (unlike the deeply unpopular use of the constitutional tool to force through the pension reforms). He has let it be known that Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne, engaged over recent months in a tense test of power with Darmanin, has assured him that the proposed regularisation of undocumented workers will remain in the bill. Sources have told Mediapart that she also approved of the open letter in Libération.
In the case that Article 3 is finally dropped, Houlié’s entourage have raised the prospect of including its substance in stand-alone draft legislation which might gain parliamentary with the support of the Left who co-signed the open letter.
But whatever the manoeuvrings of the ones and the others, no-one doubts that, in the end, it is Macron alone who will make the final decision.
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- The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version, with some added reporting, by Graham Tearse