The deputies rejected on Wednesday November 29 in committee the Republicans’ constitutional reform, presented as a response to “massive immigration”, but defeated by the majority of other groups as an anti-foreigner and anti-European “obsession”.
“All the articles having been rejected”, the law committee did not vote on the entire text, which will be examined on December 7 in the hemicycle, noted vice-president Caroline Abadie at the end debates.
The rapporteur of the text, Éric Ciotti, regretted that “the majority has systematically joined forces with the Insoumis to refuse to tackle this major problem of immigration head-on”. LR officials had made the implementation of this reform a prerequisite for any agreement with the majority on its immigration bill, currently being examined in the law committee. “France will only be able to take its destiny back into its own hands thanks to a constitutional revision,” argued Éric Ciotti.
The LR text first plans to extend the scope of the referendum to any bill or organic bill, explicitly targeting immigration issues. Above all, it intends to allow organic laws adopted by the two assemblies or by referendum to deviate from treaties, international agreements or European law when “respecting the constitutional identity of France or safeguarding (its) fundamental interests” is at stake. In a rare intervention, the president of the Laws Commission Sacha Houlié (Renaissance) called for this provision to be deleted “out of respect for what all first-year law students learn” and for “order constitutional”.
The text also plans to enshrine in the Constitution a criterion of “assimilation” to become French, the end of land rights in Mayotte, immigration quotas determined by Parliament, and to break down barriers to expel “any national » foreigner, threatening “public security” or sentenced “to a prison sentence”.
The presidential camp, the left and the independent Liot group jointly criticized these proposals. Erwan Balanant (MoDem) expressed his “sadness” to see Les Républicains “abandon humanist and republican values”. The president of the Horizons group Laurent Marcangeli estimated that it was “not the time” to launch such a reform. Jean-François Coulomme (LFI) denounced an “obsession with identity”. “We will refuse to make the Constitution a leaflet of the radicalized right and the extreme right,” criticized the ecologist Benjamin Lucas.
