The door is firmly closed, but there is one behind it, hanging around. A teasing smile on his lips, Thomas Ménage lingers in front of the offices of the Les Républicains group, his phone in hand. To one of his right-wing friends, the RN deputy sent a photo of the entrance to the building, accompanied by this little note: “Be careful, you are under surveillance. We will have to vote on this motion.”
It is 3:15 p.m., the debates on the rejection motion defended by the Ecologists to repeal the immigration bill have not yet started, and already the pressure is mounting. A premonitory message. A few hours later, in an extraordinary roar, the National Assembly challenged Gérald Darmanin’s text, with 270 votes for and 265 against.
The minister accepts it with a tense smile. With both arms outstretched, he points to the one-day alliance which allowed the adoption of this rejection motion: the oppositions on the right and the left all voted for it, with the exception of a few deputies. They have just caused the executive to suffer its biggest setback since the start of this legislature. The RN and the left-wing forces exult together. The LR right has a modest triumph. A few minutes earlier, after several days of suspense, the RN deputy Edwige Diaz and the boss of the LR group, Olivier Marleix, announced, in an electric atmosphere, that they were going to vote on the motion presented by the ecologist Benjamin Lucas. “You are completely crazy”, shouts the ex-LR, now Renaissance deputy Robin Reda to his former comrades.
In the Hemicycle, tension is at its height. Everyone does the math and mobilizes their camp. “It seems that we are in a slight majority…”, reassures a Macronist parliamentarian, nervously. “It’s good for us, the motion will not pass,” even said calmly, an advisor to Franck Riester, the Minister of Relations with Parliament, to the secretary general of the RN group, Renaud Labaye. He doesn’t know it yet, but the count isn’t there. Meanwhile, in the parliamentary enclosure, the MoDem deputy Erwan Balanant attacks the right: “I have difficulty understanding you,” he shouts, looking at the LR deputies. “We don’t care!”, retorts LR Maxime Minot. The decision of Eric Ciotti’s troops is for once almost unanimous: out of 62 deputies – including 52 voters – 40 spoke in favor, only two against (Alexandre Vincendet and Nicolas Forissier), and 11 chose to abstain. The position was decided a few minutes earlier, in a group meeting. “We expressed our disagreement without triumphalism,” says Yannick Neuder (Isère).
The phones were hot all weekend. Between the phone calls from Olivier Marleix, Éric Ciotti and those from Gérald Darmanin, the LR deputies were in great demand. The first sought to convince the hesitant while the second tried to negotiate until the end. But these “beautiful promises”, as one MP describes them, have finally demonstrated the “abysmal” gap between the intentions of the Minister of the Interior and the political markers set by the Macronist left wing in committee. An LR executive, who spoke with the Minister of the Interior, reports: “His desperate attempts to sort things out demonstrated his great concern. But he was already too late.”
So, after much hesitation, the right ended up reaching a common line. “It’s a warning shot to the government, which deleted a huge part of the Senate text,” boasts Annie Genevard (LR). “It’s a big political move from Olivier Marleix,” says another elected official. Last week, the boss of the LR deputies, in the greatest secrecy, tabled a motion to reject the text, putting maximum pressure on the government. To Le Figaro, the latter indicates that he is not making it “a personal victory” and considers that this result is part of the parliamentary debate and follows the “scandalous double language” of the Minister of the Interior. “This vote is the consequence of the “at the same time” that all the groups have denounced,” scathes the boss of the LR group.
A message that the senatorial right, the text of which had been largely reworked in committee, receives five out of five. “For Darmanin, this big gap was untenable. This text carried in its DNA the mark of the deep divisions of the presidential majority on immigration. It’s a scathing disavowal of macronism,” criticizes Bruno Retailleau.
At the National Rally, the question was summed up as follows: what would do the most harm to Gérald Darmanin, the government and the presidential camp? The decision was not that difficult to make for Marine Le Pen. However, this was not the one that seemed to emerge in the middle of last week. Those close to the former finalist in the presidential election were even “very, very divided” about the idea of immediately repealing the immigration bill. We had to keep the debate alive. But things accelerated on Thursday, when Marine Le Pen learned that Olivier Marleix had also filed a motion to reject.
At this precise moment, his decision is made: we must vote to reject the environmentalists. So, Monday morning, when Marine Le Pen announced to her entire group that she wanted the RN to vote on the motion, no one expressed the slightest reservation. “They were all definitely for it!”, rejoices a manager. “It’s not often that we have political victories,” rejoices Renaud Labaye. “The majority erred on the side of overconfidence. Gérald Darmanin never wanted to deal with us, he is paying the consequences.” A close friend of Marine Le Pen assures: “In fact, what was decisive was to return to the Senate version.”
With this rejection, it is indeed the version of the Upper House which could return to the table within a few weeks. Monday evening, the leaders of the three majority groups spoke out in favor of continuing the parliamentary examination of the text. Leaving the Hemicycle, alongside Yaël Braun-Pivet, the president of the Assembly, and Sacha Houlié, the turbulent president of the law committee, Gérald Darmanin did not hide his disappointment. While the oppositions left the parliamentary enclosure, all smiles. At the Palais Bourbon, the holidays, initially planned for the evening of December 22, therefore arrive earlier than expected.
