Metz (AFP)
Marine Le Pen said Thursday that she intended to apply "national priority" to social housing, a concept that she wishes to include more widely in the Constitution via a referendum.
According to Ms. Le Pen it is "first and foremost, the French, and particularly the modest French that must be accommodated".
"The condition to benefit from the national priority is to have French nationality", but it is "false" to say "that it would have vocation to apply according to the origins", insisted Ms. Le Pen.
"All French people, whether of French origin or having obtained French nationality, must be able to benefit from national priority in housing," she added.
"The national priority, it is in equal situation, to make the French priority at home" to access the HLM, "but today, (...) it is the reverse logic which applies", affirmed Mrs. Le Pen during a press conference in Metz.
Indeed "immigrant households are twice as often renters of low-cost housing as others" she said, seeing in it a "total deviation of the primary mission of social housing by a form of foreign priority".
An immigrant household is a household where the reference person was born a foreigner abroad (which includes French people, since one can be both an immigrant and French).
Ms. Le Pen had indicated on September 14 that she would organize, if she was elected in 2022, a referendum to enshrine national preference in the Constitution.
A presidential candidate in 2017, she was already pleading to include in the Constitution the "national priority", especially in terms of employment.
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