And now? While the government has chosen the option of the joint committee (CMP) after the vote on a motion of rejection on Monday 11 December in the National Assembly, what will happen to Gérald Darmanin's immigration bill?
By choosing to send the text to the CMP, the government has dealt with the most urgent needs. Emmanuel Macron and his prime minister, Élisabeth Borne, could have chosen to withdraw the bill and start the process from scratch. They could also have sent the bill back to the Senate for a second reading, before seeing it return to the National Assembly. In the end, they preferred to put an end to a CMP as soon as possible.
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This will bring together behind closed doors, Monday, December 18 at 17 p.m., fourteen parliamentarians who will reflect the political balances of the two chambers: deputies Sacha Houlié, Florent Boudié and Marie Guévenoux (Renaissance), Élodie Jacquier-Laforge (MoDem), Annie Genevard (Les Républicains), Yoann Gillet (National Rally), Andrée Taurinya (La France insoumise); Senators Bruno Retailleau, François-Noël Buffet and Muriel Jourda (Les Républicains), Philippe Bonnecarrère (Union centrist), Marie-Pierre de La Gontrie and Corinne Narassiguin (Socialist Party), and Olivier Bitz (Renaissance).
In this configuration, the CMP is clearly leaning to the right. And as the text voted by the Senate in November will serve as a basis for the work of parliamentarians, the presidential majority will "unquestionably" leave with a handicap against the elected Republicans (LR) in the negotiation, acknowledged, Thursday, December 14, the president of the law commission of the Palais Bourbon, Sacha Houlié, on France 2. Here is an overview of the different possible scenarios.
🔴🗣️ "By voting for the motion of rejection, the left has played the politics of the worst. If the CMP reaches an agreement, the #LoiImmigration will be more to the right than what the Assembly would have voted," said Sacha Houlié. #Les4V @SachaHoulie pic.twitter.com/82wBv4DX04
— Télématin (@telematin) December 14, 2023
Compromise between LR and the presidential majority
The government hopes to convince Les Républicains deputies and senators to accept some compromises. He has resigned himself to the fact that the most emblematic measure of what he considers to be the "humanity" part of the immigration bill – the regularization of undocumented workers in occupations in short supply – will be transformed into a possibility, and no longer a right, to be regularized, with cases being dealt with on a case-by-case basis at the discretion of the prefects.
On the other hand, the presidential majority has established red lines on which LR parliamentarians will have to evolve: maintenance of state medical aid (AME), prohibition of placing minors under sixteen in detention centers, no restriction of the right of the soil, withdrawal of the article that conditions the benefit of certain social assistance to five years of residence in France.
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If an agreement were to be reached between LR and the presidential majority, the text would then be submitted to the vote of the Senate and the National Assembly the next day, Tuesday 19 December. It would then remain to be seen whether the Renaissance and MoDem MPs approve the compromise reached in the CMP. The left wing of these two groups has been insisting for several weeks on its attachment to the regularization of undocumented immigrants and to the maintenance of the AME in particular. Some of the votes could therefore be missing during the election, making the outcome of the vote uncertain, especially since the National Rally (RN) has indicated that its deputies will vote against the new text if the measures allowing the regularization of certain undocumented migrants are maintained.
A conclusive CMP, but with a very right-wing text
There is what the government is hoping for and what Éric Ciotti is announcing. The LR boss reaffirmed his state of mind on Thursday 14 December to Élisabeth Borne, who received him in Matignon: the CMP will have to ratify "the entire text of the Senate, nothing but the Senate". Faced with such a refusal to compromise, it is difficult to imagine the immigration bill voted on Tuesday, as the presidential majority has only bad options on the table.
Because if it were to accept an agreement with very few concessions from LR, notably on the regularisation of undocumented migrants and the AME, there is no doubt that the text resulting from the CMP would trigger a crisis within Macron. Especially if the bill were finally to be adopted in the National Assembly without the votes of the left wing of the presidential majority, but with those of the extreme right.
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To avoid such a configuration, there remains the option of Article 49.3 of the Constitution, which allows a text to be adopted without a vote. But Emmanuel Macron refuses to use it, he explained on Tuesday evening during a dinner at the Élysée Palace.
CMP fails, bill scrapped
Faced with the risk of seeing its majority fracture in the event of intransigence by Les Républicains elected representatives during the CMP, the parliamentarians of the presidential majority could simply acknowledge that an agreement is impossible. In this case, the joint committee would be "inconclusive" and no text would be submitted to the vote in the Senate and the National Assembly.
The government would then have the opportunity to resume the parliamentary shuttle by sending the bill back to the Senate for a second reading, before it returns to the National Assembly. But the government has already made it known that it will not run again for one round and that the text will simply be abandoned.
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