PARIS – French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin offered to resign on Monday after his controversial immigration law was rejected by the National Assembly, but President Emmanuel Macron refused to accept it.
The rejection of the bill on the first day of debates in the House of Commons is a crushing defeat for the government after it spent over a year negotiating and refining the details. The law, already voted on in the Senate, aims to speed up the deportation of foreigners who have committed crimes on French soil and, in some cases, provides for measures to legalize illegal workers.
In an interview with the broadcaster TF1, Darmanin admitted the government's defeat. “This is of course a failure because I wanted to give police, gendarmes and judges the tools to fight illegal immigration,” he said.
On Monday, Macron called on Darmanin to “present new proposals to move forward by overcoming this deadlock and obtaining an effective law,” according to a presidential adviser quoted by AFP.
After losing his majority in parliamentary elections last year, Macron struggled to pass legislation and had to rely on ad hoc agreements with the conservative opposition party Les Républicains. But many Conservative MPs called for significantly stricter immigration laws and refused to vote with the government on such a sensitive issue.
The defeat for Darmanin was particularly humiliating as the bill was narrowly defeated before it had even been debated. The government lost the vote by 270 votes to 265.
Victory for the opposition
The government now faces the enormous task of finding a way out of the impasse. She can decide to send the rejected immigration bill back to the Senate, send it to a joint committee of senators and representatives to find a compromise – or abandon it. It may also use a controversial constitutional maneuver to pass it without a vote.
On Monday evening, French Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne was scheduled to hold an emergency meeting with several ministers and lawmakers to find a way forward.
Opposition parties, from the far-right Rassemblement National to the far-left France Unbowed, were in a celebratory mood after Monday night's vote.
Far-right leader Marine Le Pen told reporters she was “delighted” with the result and said lawmakers had “protected the French from a new migration pull factor and the resettlement of migrants in French villages.”
“It feels like the end of the road for his law and therefore for him,” far-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon wrote online.