The table is large and noisy. She sings at the top of her voice “Darmanin resignation! Darmanin resignation!” On the seats and sofa of La Dauphine, a small bistro a stone’s throw from the National Assembly of environmentalist deputies including Sandrine Rousseau, Charles Fournier and Sandra Regol. Some collaborators are there this Monday, December 11 in the evening. Their colleague Benjamin Lucas, the one who brought the motion to reject a little earlier, this blow which made Gérald Darmanin and his immigration law choke up, arrives to a deluge of applause. We toast to the star of the day. Chief scalper. The euphoria of a left lacking political victories, prey to doubt since the Nupes exploded. In fact, the left has disarmed itself.
Politics is a matter of blows, sometimes, often. That of the left seems to have been successful: the pride of the Minister of the Interior has come up against the wall of parliamentary reality, Emmanuel Macron is sinking into political immobility forced by the absence of a majority frank and the shift of Renaissance to the right – or perhaps it is the opposite – continues. The left only had one shot in its gun, but should it be fired? Political skill has its limits when it erodes its principles and comes at the cost of accommodation.
“The smart guys”
Thus – this is the will of Emmanuel Macron – the immigration text will continue its legislative path, heading to the Joint Joint Commission. The left, which wanted to be an apostle of parliamentarism, leaves it to the government to move forward in the CMP, this black box of the Fifth Republic, this closed session bringing together 7 senators and 7 deputies and where the voices of the right carry weight. LR will weigh even more to concoct the text that they have been hoping for for months, the one that the senators had established at first reading. “The smart leftists who are celebrating their victory find themselves this evening with a text which eliminates the AME. Bravo to them,” laughs a minister. The left will not bear responsibility for the hardening of the text but they have washed their hands of it.
To succeed in its rejection motion, the left needed the right – this, it assumed – but also the National Rally. Of course, she did not vote for a motion initiated by the RN, a red line that she has always been careful not to cross, but the reality is more insidious: she accepted the votes of the extreme right. Yesterday, it was inconceivable, listening to La France insoumise, to walk the same path as that of Marine Le Pen to march against anti-Semitism. Today, we feast on it while holding our noses. “It’s the parliamentary game,” said Manuel Bompard on RTL who recalls, rightly and not without displeasing him, all those times when the RN came to the aid of the government and its majority. Is the RN less monstrous when it comes to its own aid?
Should we celebrate with great pomp the failure of Gérald Darmanin, blunder with a tweet like Sandrine Rousseau – “Darmanin cheh“(Editor’s note: well done)? On immigration, the left has often complained of not being able to hold the spit, of not having sufficient media time to make its speech in the face of that, omnipresent, of the RN or from the right. With this motion of rejection, the left threw the coin in the air, taking the risk that it would land on the wrong side. The coin was rigged: heads, I lose; tails, you win.