“Emmanuel Macron wanted at all costs a text on immigration before Christmas. Or else, forget it and turn the page. We had to put an end to this imbroglio which had lasted too long.” This is how the Belgian daily The evening opens his article after the vote on the immigration bill, finally adopted painfully on Tuesday December 19 by Parliament with the votes of the Republicans and the National Rally. “A turning point for the five-year term”, continues The eveningwhich recalls the “threat of resignation of a handful of ministers from the left wing of the majority”, while only the Minister of Health Aurélien Rousseau has so far matched his words with action.
The adoption of this text on immigration, an often controversial subject well beyond France, will have caused most of the main European media to react. Starting with our German neighbors. Daily life Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung highlighted “an earthquake” after the adoption of this “controversial law”, described as “one of the strictest on immigration in the EU”. Back in Belgium, The Free was amused by a country which discovered “the joys of the CMP (for joint joint committee) after becoming experts in 49.3 and in rejection motions”, while highlighting a bill which “fractures Macronie” .
“A humiliating compromise”
The British daily The Guardianmarked on the center left, does not hesitate to speak for his part of a “political crisis” for the French government, emphasizing that “the new law contains so many strict measures that the far-right candidate Marine Le Pen has qualified it of “ideological victory”. An observation shared by The Economistyet more liberal, which underlines that the executive is “plunged into crisis” after the adoption of this text, recalling that “52 of the 251 deputies of its majority abstained or voted against the bill, complaining that he bows to the demands of the hard right.”
For The Times, a British daily rather centre-right, it is undoubtedly Marine Le Pen who “triumphed” over this political sequence, while President Macron “was forced to accept a humiliating compromise with the right-wing parties”. According to them, this remains a “further sign of Macron’s shift to the right, echoing an underlying trend in a large part of Europe”. On the side ofEl Mundoone of the main Spanish newspapers and also rather center-right, “the challenge that Macron will face for the rest of his mandate is revealed: not only is he finding it increasingly difficult to get his reforms approved, but he is also faced with fissures within his camp”.
Across the Atlantic, the New York Times recalls that “the French leader was elected twice promising to keep populism at bay, but his bill received rare support from the far right.” But the American daily recalls that “unlike the pension reform, unpopular from start to finish, recent polls showed that 60 to 80% of French people were in favor of stricter immigration rules similar to those present in the law” .
End clap for presidentialism?
The Swiss daily The weather, never stingy in criticizing the limits of the French political system, even questioned a potential “end clap for presidentialism” of the Fifth Republic. Emmanuel Macron “probably remains what he is, a centrist” for the Swiss newspaper, “but Parliament now leans to the right, and it is therefore he who makes the law (for this time in any case). As in n “any vulgar parliamentary system.”
Our Swiss neighbors also denounce Emmanuel Macron’s maneuver of not promulgating the law if it had been adopted thanks to the votes of the National Rally – a contested reality, depending on how we look at the figures. “A single man can therefore still decide that 88 deputies and their voters are worthless,” points out the Swiss newspaper.
But The weather nevertheless reminds us of what must be one of the purposes of this political sequence: a speech by Emmanuel Macron, scheduled for this Wednesday evening on the show C to you, on France 5: “He will be the one who must ultimately defend his text and his method. The defense of the immigration law will effectively be raised over the weeks from the Minister of the Interior, to the Prime Minister, until finally reach the one who still decides everything: the President of the Republic.”