Emmanuel Macron said he didn’t want it, and Gérald Darmanin said he could do without it. “There will be no text if there is no majority without the RN,” insisted the Minister of the Interior, Tuesday, December 19, before the solemn vote of the National Assembly on its immigration law . “The majority was large and, even if we remove the votes of the National Rally, very large,” he then congratulated himself at the end of the vote, despite the sixty Macronist votes who were missing. Comments echoing a position defended in private by the President of the Republic: during a meeting at the Élysée, the head of state affirmed in front of several relatives that he would activate article 10 of the Constitution and would seize the Constitutional Council in order to have the vote invalidated if its salvation rested on the reinforcement of Marine Le Pen’s troops.
As a result, from the moment Yaël Braun-Pivet spoke at the perch, many elected officials watched the figures. “The ballot is closed. Here is the result of the vote: voters, 573; expressed, 535; majority, 268; for, 349; against 186. The National Assembly adopted,” the president of the Palais Bourbon barely had time to explain before a good part of the chamber had already taken out their calculators to do the accounts. And for good reason, without the 88 votes of the National Rally – which the group voted entirely for – the text would have obtained only 261 votes.
At first glance, more than enough to win against 186 opponents. But this misleading observation only applies if the nationalist parliamentarians had abstained. Because if they had finally decided to vote against, their 88 votes would then have been added to the 186 unfavorable votes, thus tilting the balance to the other side and leading to the rejection of the text: the 261 votes in favor would no longer have enough to compensate for the 274 votes against. Rather than being definitively adopted by Parliament, as is now the case, the executive text would have been definitively buried if necessary.
“This is not the subject”, we evacuate to the Ministry of the Interior, explaining that the Mendès France jurisprudence consists only of “deducting” the votes. Allusion to an episode from 1954, when Pierre Mendès France refused the communist votes during his inauguration as head of the Council so as not to let himself be confined by a majority to which he was hostile. “In addition, part of the majority’s votes against were induced by the RN’s choice to vote for,” we insist in Beauvau. And to calculate: “If the RN had not been physically there, the majority would have been lowered to 242, and we have 261 votes. This clearly proves that we did not need the RN to pass this text.”
