“It's at the end of the fair that we count the dung”declared Bruno Rétailleau, then president of the Les Républicains (LR) group in the Senate, while Gérald Darmanin welcomed the senators' adoption of his immigration bill. The time for reckoning has arrived.
On Monday, September 23, Mr. Retailleau became Minister of the Interior in place of Mr. Darmanin and if he did not pronounce the word “immigration” During the transfer of power, Place Beauvau, he announced his objective in an interview with the Figaro : “put a stop to illegal entries” And “increase outputs”. In the evening, on TF1, he clarified his thoughts – “I think that mass immigration is not an opportunity for France” – by tackling the subject on which the right has most sought to mark its “identity” difference with Macronie, even if it means adopting a rhetoric previously reserved for the far right.
Prime Minister Michel Barnier had already warned on September 22 on France 2 that“There will be much more rigor, there will be ruptures,” he who, during his campaign for the LR primary in 2021, defended the elimination of state medical aid (AME), a basket of care for undocumented foreigners, or even a referendum to establish a “constitutional shield” and free itself from European rules.
Measures contrary to the Constitution
Positions in agreement, therefore, with those defended by the new boss of Place Beauvau, according to the profile which emerges from the archives published by the National Audiovisual Institute (INA) on Sunday, relating to “twenty-five years of statements by the new Minister of the Interior on immigration”. We hear Bruno Retailleau say in 1997 about African immigration that “These are people who do not have the same culture as us, these are people who come, not to be French but very often to benefit from social rights”. An ardent supporter of assimilation, he is convinced that“A part of immigration refuses to enter the national narrative”. More recently, he denounced the“savagery of French society”linking the“mass immigration” and the number of homicides. He is also convinced that France is too attractive in terms of asylum, access to care, family reunification and naturalization.
Within 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 asylum applications within French consular posts abroad.
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Source: Lemonde
