Spotlight on the “Wise Men”: the Constitutional Council delivers its long-awaited decision on Thursday on the immigration law, adopted in December at the cost of a political crisis in the presidential camp, where partial censorship of the controversial text would be viewed favorably eye. The nine judges will submit their papers in the afternoon, from 4:30 p.m. at the earliest. It promises to be complicated, as the measures in the spotlight are legion in the bill, hardened under pressure from the right and passed with the support of the extreme right.
Restrictions on family reunification, access to social benefits or even the end of the automaticity of land law: the provisions which, according to jurists, are threatened by the constitutional filter are also the most criticized in the text. These are mainly those demanded by Les Républicains (LR) and granted by a reluctant presidential majority, but seeking to avoid getting bogged down. Concessions which triggered an internal crisis, culminating with the display of the moods of several ministers and the resignation of one of them.
Tens of thousands of people took to the streets again on Sunday against the law. And opponents – associations, collectives, lawyers, unions – will denounce on Thursday at the Council in Paris a text “seriously infringing on the rights of exiled people”.
Crisis in the presidential camp
The favorable vote of the deputies of the National Rally (RN), hailed as an “ideological victory”, left a bitter taste in the presidential camp, where censorship of the most corrosive articles is expected as an escape. Even within the executive, which paradoxically openly wanted part of a text it initiated to be censored.
For Emmanuel Macron, in the absence of an absolute majority in the Assembly, it was necessary to accept “things that sometimes do not please us”, including potentially unconstitutional ones. “I fully accept it,” he said to the majority parliamentarians on January 15, after having himself referred the matter to the Constitutional Council. “Have we ever seen a President of the Republic and ministers explain that they do not respect the rule of law? It’s very serious,” the president of the rebellious deputies Mathilde Panot blasted Thursday on LCI .
The institution, already in the spotlight during the pension reform, is not “a chamber of appeal for the choices of Parliament”, recalled its president, the former socialist Prime Minister Laurent Fabius. The Sages will rebut the “legislative riders”, these parliamentary additions which they judge to have no sufficient link with the subject of the government’s initial copy. And they will censor in substance the articles which, according to them, flout constitutional principles and values.
“A horse butcher’s shop”
They have a lot to do: the bill went from 27 articles to 86, mainly due to the additions of LR. “It’s going to be horse butchery,” anticipates a Renaissance executive in the Assembly, ironically about the “riders as big as Percherons” that the right insisted on inserting into the text. The leader of the LR senators, Bruno Retailleau, on the front line on the drafting of the text finally voted on, asked Thursday on France Inter the Constitutional Council to “stick to the law, to the Constitution” seeing this as “the only way for the wise men of the Council to avoid criticism”.
Several dozen measures are targeted in the referrals from left-wing parliamentarians, including four also cited in that of the Macronist President of the Assembly Yaël Braun-Pivet. This concerns in particular the length of residence required for non-Europeans to benefit from social benefits such as family allowances, set at five years for those not working and 30 months for others. For Personalized Housing Assistance (APL), these thresholds were set at 5 years and 3 months.
A consecration of the “national preference” dear to the RN, rejoices the latter and accuses the left. The tightening of family reunification is also in the sights, as is the establishment of “quotas” set by Parliament to cap the number of foreigners admitted to the territory, the deposit required from foreign students, or the end of automaticity of obtaining French nationality upon reaching the age of majority for people born in France to foreign parents.
If too many measures were declared unconstitutional, “we will simply have to return to the proposal that was ours” to revise the Constitution, warned President LR of the Senate Gérard Larcher on Tuesday. But this reform, providing for the possibility of derogating from EU rules, is excluded by the majority.