French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin offered to resign on Monday after the National Assembly rejected his controversial immigration bill, but President Emmanuel Macron refused to accept it, POLITICO reports.
The bill, which has already been voted on in the Senate, aims to speed up the deportation of foreigners who have committed crimes on French territory and includes measures to legalise illegal workers in some cases. The rejection of the bill on the first day of debate in the lower house of parliament was a crushing defeat for the government after more than a year of negotiations and discussion of details.
In an interview with TF1 channel, Darmanin recognised the government’s defeat.
“It’s a failure, of course, because I wanted to give police officers, gendarmes… and judges the tools to defeat illegal immigration.”
On Monday, Emmanuel Macron asked Darmanin to present “new proposals to move forward, overcoming this blockage and obtaining an effective law”.
Macron is having difficulty passing legislation and has relied on special deals with the opposition conservative Les Républicains party since losing his majority in parliamentary elections last year. But many conservative MPs have called for tougher legislation on immigration and have refused to vote with the government on such an explosive issue.
As the bill was rejected by a minimal margin before it even began debate, Darmanin’s defeat was particularly humiliating. The government lost the vote by 270 votes to 265.
The government now faces the difficult task of breaking the deadlock. It can decide to send the rejected immigration bill back to the Senate, send it to a joint committee of senators and MPs to find a compromise, or abandon it. It could also use a controversial constitutional manoeuvre to pass it without a vote.
French Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne was due to hold an emergency meeting with several ministers and lawmakers on Monday night to find further ways to resolve the issue.
Opposition parties, from the right National Rally to the left Unruly France, were in a celebratory mood after Monday night’s vote. Marine Le Pen told reporters she was “delighted” with the vote, saying lawmakers had “protected the French from the new factor of migration and the resettlement of migrants in French villages”. Jean-Luc Mélenchon wrote online:
“It feels like the end of the road for his law and therefore for him.”
