On Thursday the French Constitutional Court rejected most of the articles of the disputed immigration law proposed by the government, which therefore will not be able to come into force. One might have expected the news to arouse controversy from the government itself, but on the contrary, President Emmanuel Macron said he was satisfied with the sentence, and signed the law as soon as possible so that it would immediately enter into force: the parts of the law rejected in fact they were mainly those included in the bill by the right-wing parties, with which the (centre) government had temporarily allied itself to obtain the majority of votes needed in parliament to pass the law.
The law in question had a rather bumpy approval process, also due to the protests it aroused from the population. In its first form it had encountered opposition both from the centre-right, which considered it too soft, and from the centre-left, which considered it too right-wing: so it was rejected by parliament. It contained both very restrictive measures and others which instead sought to encourage the integration of migrant people rather than limit their arrivals.
After the rejection it was therefore rewritten by a parliamentary commission: the new version was much more conservative, and was therefore also liked by the right-wing parties, who decided to vote for it. It was approved with 349 votes in favor and 186 against. The choice of President Emmanuel Macron’s party to accept the most conservative changes and to vote for a law much appreciated by Rassemblement National (Marine Le Pen’s far-right party) had triggered strong controversy: 27 deputies from Macron’s party had voted against the reform, 17 had abstained and the Minister of Health Aurélien Rousseau he had resigned in protest.
On January 25, however, the French Constitutional Court rejected 35 of the 86 articles contained in the law: three of these were considered unconstitutional, including the particularly controversial one which required parliament to establish annually the quota of people who could legally enter France. The other thirty-two rejected articles, however, were considered too disconnected from the rest of the law to be included in the text. These measures could not come into force, but could still be included in a new law in the future.
Among these there are some on the restriction of access to social security for migrant people, and others that would have made family reunification and obtaining residence permits more difficult for them. There was also the reintroduction of the crime of “illegal residence” and the weakening of the right alonethat is, the right to obtain citizenship of the country in which one was born.
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Despite the Constitutional Court intervening so heavily on one of its laws, the government had generally positive reactions, insisting on its desire to bring it into force as soon as possible. The rejected articles were mainly those introduced by the right-wing parties, while almost all the articles initially presented by the government were confirmed.
The law, however, remains rather right-wing, and among other things provides for a simplification of the mechanisms for the expulsion of foreigners who commit crimes in France and the introduction of a single judge to evaluate asylum applications. In recent years, in fact, the governments led by Macron have progressively moved further to the right.
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According to an editorial in the French newspaper The world the government would have “used the Constitutional Court to try to make people forget that they voted with the Republicans”, the center-right party with which Macron’s party had allied itself to get the law approved, abandoning them immediately afterwards.
For their part, the Republicans have highly criticized the Court’s decision. Many have proposed reforming the French system to reduce the power of constitutional judges, and some have accused them of collusion with the government. The Rassemblement National also expressed similar positions.
The president of the Senate, Gérard Larcher of the Republicans, asked the government to present a new bill containing the articles rejected not for their unconstitutionality, but for their inconsistency with the rest of the law. Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin, who had proposed the immigration reform, however excluded it, somehow demonstrating that the government had no great interest in introducing those measures. A ministry spokesperson told the French newspaper The Parisian that the minister had spoken in parliament “about twenty times” to point out to right-wing parliamentarians that the measures they were proposing would be deemed inadmissible.