A combative Emmanuel Macron has defended his controversial immigration bill, including the measures supported by the far right.
The French president appeared on a prime time news discussion programme to answer questions about the bill and denied the law passed by MPs on Tuesday had provoked a political crisis in his centrist government, despite the resignation of a high-profile minister.
Macron was speaking this Wednesday on the C dans l’air programme, on France 5, and the usual team taking part in the programme had been invited to the Elysée. It was more informal than the usual presidential interviews and Macron also covered a wide range of issues.
Macron said in the interview he respected the decision of health minister, Aurélien Rousseau, to step down but insisted nobody was irreplaceable, him “first of all”.
He denied accusations that the legislation pandered to the far-right National Rally (RN), which claimed it an ideological victory, and accused Marine Le Pen’s party of “crude manoeuvring”. He said: “There are not RN ideas in the text. It’s a defeat for the RN.”
Macron added: “Fighting illegal immigration is not just a subject just for the [political] right. If you live in a working-class area affected by this you are for this law. If you live in nice areas where you’re not affected by these problems you can say, ‘oh, it’s not good’, but a lot of people in sensitive areas support this law.”
The original bill proposed by the government was thrown out of the national assembly 10 days ago after a motion to reject it proposed by the Green party was supported by the hard left and far right.
The government, which has no absolute majority in the house since last year’s general election, then passed the bill to a cross-party parliamentary committee of MPs and senators to write a new text. Members of the senate, controlled by the right, added a number of hardline measures not in the original text.
Macron admitted he did not agree with all the changes but said that was not sufficient reason to abandon the legislation that had taken more than a year to draw up and adopt.
He said: “It’s understandable that it’s upset certain people and I respect that. You can speak about values but we’re talking about reality. The text was written by the government but is the fruit of a compromise. It’s what the people wanted when they voted and gave us a relative majority.
“What choice did we have. Should we have said we will stop – that fighting illegal immigration is a bad idea? No. We set up a committee to come up with a compromise. This text is the fruit of that compromise.
“Do I jump for joy at it? No. There are things in it I don’t like … the question for the government was, do we block it because we don’t like parts of it? No. When you govern you have to make difficult choices. Do we say we need to do something useful for the country or do we do nothing because it’s not exactly what we wanted? The country was waiting for this law.
“Today what is feeding the RN is the feeling people sometimes have that measures are not efficient … this will help more effectively combat clandestine immigration and the people smugglers. We are a country that has always welcomed people and we will continue to do so. But we have to combat the flow of clandestine immigration and our processes are too long and complicated to do so, and that’s a loss of control.
“Our first objective is combating illegal immigration and the second is to encourage better integration through language and work. Those are the two objects of the text.”
