No figure of the communist resistance, and a fortiori no foreign resistance fighter, had until now been entitled to this honor, unlike the Gaullist resistance, with the pantheonization in 1964 of Jean Moulin. And therefore, the President of the Republic Emmanuel Macron believes that the National Assembly should refrain from attending the ceremony of entry into the Pantheon of foreign communist resistance Missak Manouchian on Wednesday, in an interview with the daily newspaper Humanity posted online Sunday February 18.
“The far-right forces would be inspired not to be present, given the nature of Manouchian’s fight,” declared the head of state.
“As for the tribute to Robert Badinter from which the elected representatives of the RN were absent”, at the request of the family of the former Minister of Justice, “the spirit of decency, the relationship with history should lead them to make a choice,” argued Emmanuel Macron. “But I am not going, through an arbitrary gesture, to decide,” he added, believing that his “duty is to invite all the representatives elected by the French people” without having to “sort between them”.
The RN or Reconquest not in the Republican arc
In this interview, Emmanuel Macron returned to the debate which runs through the presidential majority around the integration – or not – of the National Rally in the “republican arc”. At the beginning of February, Prime Minister Gabriel Attal included the RN and more generally all the forces represented in the Assembly, arguing that behind these parties, there are “millions of French people who voted”.
“The National Assembly welcomes all the forces elected by the people. Do they all adhere to the Republic and its values? No. This is also true for far-left groups,” considered Emmanuel Macron for his part. , targeting “certain personalities of rebellious France” who, “through their positions”, “fight the values of the Republic”.
“Even if I do not posit an equivalence between the two extremes. I never considered that the RN or Reconquest were part of the Republican arc,” he clarified.
The Head of State assures in passing that he has set a principle concerning the RN deputies: “that important texts should not pass thanks to their votes. This distinction is enough to say where I live”.
“I don’t have the spirit of defeat”
Asked about Marine Le Pen’s chances of coming to power in 2027, Emmanuel Macron, who will not be able to run again, assures: “I do not have the spirit of defeat”. “The feeling of loss of control fuels the RN. Many of its voters consider Europe as a world too open, too complicated. So the magic formula would be a return to nationalism,” notes the head of state.
“Deindustrialization and the feeling of downgrading have fueled the far right. We began to respond to it with the drop in unemployment and the start of reindustrialization. It’s a long process,” he argues.
He defends the abolition of land rights in Mayotte
Emmanuel Macron also defended his controversial proposal to revise the Constitution to remove land rights in Mayotte because it is necessary to “break the migratory phenomenon” on the island “at the risk of a collapse of public services”. “It is legitimate to ask this question because the Mahorais are suffering. They have also welcomed this proposal very positively, whatever their political sensitivities. We must break the migratory phenomenon in Mayotte, at the risk of a collapse of public services on the island”, he pleads in this interview.
Mayotte is a French department in the heart of the very poor Comoros archipelago. “Families travel there and arrive in France, via Mayotte, where they have access to services completely unrelated to the socio-economic reality of the archipelago,” he judges. “Mayotte is the first maternity ward in France, with women who come to give birth there to have French babies. Objectively, we must be able to respond to this situation,” he says.
“Added to this is a new phenomenon in recent months, given the security difficulties in the Great Lakes region: a massive arrival of people from Tanzania and other countries,” he explains. To “break this migratory phenomenon”, Emmanuel Macron also wants to “restrict access to social rights for people in an irregular situation”.
But the president assures that “restricting land rights for Mayotte does not mean doing it for the rest of the country”, as the right and the far right are demanding. “I remain very deeply attached to this right for France,” he assures. According to him, this proposal to revise the Constitution “is not an attack on the indivisible Republic because the Constitution also recognizes it as plural and decentralized.” “We can adapt the Basic Law to overseas territories: we did it for French Polynesia, for New Caledonia,” he underlines.