Under pressure, Laurent Fabius raises his voice. The President of the Constitutional Council declared, this Friday, January 26, that he considered the “questioning of institutions” to be “very worrying”, while the Sages are under fire from criticism from the right and the extreme right after the broad censorship of the immigration law.
“To attack the Constitutional Council for a decision which is perfectly legal and to say” that “it is a coup d’état, not only is it false, but in a certain way, it is a questioning of the institutions. And so I find that very worrying,” he reacted on France 5, questioned about comments from Laurent Wauquiez, president of Les Républicains of the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region and putative future candidate in the 2027 presidential election, who had criticized a “coup d’état de j’état” on the part of the Council. For his part, the president of the National Rally Jordan Bardella denounced “a coup by the judges, with the support of the President of the Republic himself”.
“Not here to provide political services”
Already this Friday morning on France Inter, Laurent Fabius had stressed that the Constitutional Council is “not there to provide political services” but “a legal decision”. “It is still very specific, including in History, to consider that those who are responsible, under the Constitution, for stating the law, are carrying out a coup d’état against the law,” commented the president of the Advice.
“I don’t want to draw a historical parallel, but in general, when we develop this kind of statement, it makes you think,” added the former socialist Prime Minister. “Our decision takes up exactly what we call jurisprudence”, which “goes back several decades”, he claimed about the “legislative riders”, these measures rebutted because they were judged to have no direct or indirect link with the text of law under discussion. “What would we not have said we had modified our jurisprudence on the occasion of this important question”, he insisted.
The “not trivial” method of the presidential camp
“The legislative riders […], that does not mean that we are censoring the provision in substance. It can come back to the merits and at that time, we will say what we think about it,” recalled Laurent Fabius, while Senator Hervé Marseille, president of the centrist group, has already announced a bill to take up a large part of the censored articles.
And the Council is not “guided by the polls, otherwise, instead of the Constitutional Council, we must appoint the director of Sofres”, also slipped Laurent Fabius. The President of the Constitutional Council also judged the method of the presidential camp, which itself seemed to hope for partial censorship of the law, to be “not trivial”. LR and RN denounce the decision of the Constitutional Council, which largely censored the tightening made by the right to the immigration law: restriction of social benefits and family reunification, return guarantee for foreign students… The president of LR Eric Ciotti castigated Friday on RMC a “democratic hold-up”, deeming the Council’s decision “scandalous”.