“It is at the end of the fair that we count the manure”“It is time for a reckoning,” declared Bruno Retailleau, then president of the Les Républicains (LR) group in the Senate, while Gérald Darmanin welcomed the adoption by the senators of his immigration bill. “The time has come for a reckoning.”
On Monday, September 23, Mr. Retailleau took over as Minister of the Interior, replacing Mr. Darmanin, and although he did not speak “immigration” During the transfer of power, in the Place Beauvau, in the afternoon he showed his objective in an interview in the Figaro : “Stop illegal entries” AND “increase production”. In the evening, on TF1, he clarified his thoughts: “I think that mass immigration is not an opportunity for France” – addressing the issue on which the right has most sought to mark its difference in “identity” with Macron, even if that means adopting rhetoric hitherto reserved for the far right.
Prime Minister Michel Barnier had already warned on Sunday on France 2 that“There will be much more rigor, there will be ruptures”, He who, during his campaign for the LR primaries, in 2021, defended the abolition of state medical aid (AME), a care basket for undocumented foreigners, or even a referendum to establish a “constitutional shield” and free ourselves from European standards.
Measures contrary to the Constitution
Positions coinciding, therefore, with those defended by the new head of the Beauvau square, according to the profile that emerges from the files published by the National Audiovisual Institute on Sunday, relating to “Twenty-five years of statements by the new Minister of the Interior on immigration”. We heard Bruno Retailleau say in 1997 about African immigration that “These are people who do not have the same culture as us, they are people who come, not to be French, but very often to benefit from social rights.”. A fervent supporter of assimilation, he is convinced that“part of immigration refuses to enter the national narrative”. More recently, he denounced the“Savage of French society”linking the“mass immigration” and the number of homicides. He is also convinced of the great attractiveness of France in terms of asylum, access to healthcare, family reunification and naturalisation.
Within the LR, he defended measures contrary to the Constitution, such as the establishment of a national preference for access to social benefits or the limitation of the submission of asylum applications to French consular offices abroad.
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