Republicans say they will not "vote" on the immigration bill as it stands

“I say it very clearly: we will not be complicit in this announced failure,” continued the deputy for Alpes-Maritimes during a press conference at the Paris headquarters of his party, pointing out “a cheap text” , “without ambition” and “which will ultimately solve nothing”.

Surrounded by the presidents of the LR parliamentary groups in the Senate and the National Assembly, Bruno Retailleau and Olivier Marleix, the boss of the Republicans, on the contrary, praised the version of the text as voted by the upper house in mid-November.

The bill was then revised by the Law Commission of the National Assembly, and it is this new version which arrives on December 11 in the hemicycle of the Palais Bourbon.

The Senate had "considerably improved and resulted in a text whose scope I welcomed and which marked very concrete progress, as far as we could go within the current constitutional framework", underlined Mr. Marleix.

At the time, however, he expressed his reluctance towards this version.

Asked about possible abstentions on the part of deputies from his group, he assured that he would not “reason like that”.

“At present, I do not see many deputies within the group who are ready to validate a massive regularization movement,” he explained, arguing that “if people have problems of internal coherence, it is to them that the question must be asked.”

“The LR group is not completely homogeneous” in the Assembly, responded the Macronist rapporteur of the bill Florent Boudié, mentioning the “two divergent opinions in committee”: the vote for the LR deputy for Mayotte Mansour Kamardine and against his colleague from Doubs Annie Genevard.

“It is not easy for a moderate left and moderate right MP to explain why he is against this text,” said MP Renaissance.

Before the start of the debates on Monday in the hemicycle, the deputies will have to decide on an overall “motion to reject” the text.

Like the left-wing groups, LR had submitted one, but it is that of the environmentalist deputies which will be debated, after having been drawn by lot on Wednesday by the Assembly services.

It has almost no chance of being adopted, the RN having indicated that it would not vote in favor of it - "we want to debate" indicated the deputy Jean-Philippe Tanguy - and the LR being reluctant to vote for a motion too marked to the left on immigration.