PARIS, Sept 18 (NNN-AGENCIES) — With an eye on re-election, France’s Emmanuel Macron has signalled a tougher line on immigration, arguing that the government must end its “lax” approach to prevent voters from drifting to the far right.
Setting out his priorities for the second half of his mandate on Monday evening, Macron said that his centrist Republic on the Move (LREM) party risked being seen as “bourgeois” unless it tackled the issue of immigration.
“By claiming to be humanist we are sometimes too lax,” he told a meeting of his ministers and ruling party representatives, claiming that France’s asylum laws were being “misused” by people-smuggling networks and “people who manipulate” the system.
The question for his three-year-old party, which has struggled to establish a presence in small-town and rural France, was “whether we want to be a bourgeois party or not,” Macron was quoted by party members as telling the meeting.
“The bourgeois have no problem with this (immigration). They don’t come up against it. The working classes live with it. For decades the left didn’t want to deal with this problem so the working class migrated to the far right.”
An Ispos/Sopra Steria poll on divisions in French society published Tuesday showed that 63 per cent of respondents felt there were “too many foreigners in France.”
Anti-foreigner sentiment was strongest among working-class respondents, with 88 per cent saying they were too many immigrants.
Sixty-six per cent also said they felt that immigrants did not try hard enough to integrate.
During the 2017 presidential campaign, Macron was fulsome in his praise of the welcome extended by German Chancellor Angela Merkel to over a million Syrian refugees, crediting her and the German people with having “saved our collective dignity.”
But since coming to office, he has taken a tough line on so-called economic migrants who leave home in search of better opportunities abroad, drawing a firm distinction between them and refugees fleeing war or persecution.
France last year received a record 122,743 asylum requests, up 22 percent compared to 2017.
French media and opposition parties see his latest remarks as linked to local elections next March and a signal that he is preparing to seek a second term in 2022.
Polls show that since 2017, Macron’s core support has shifted from the centre towards the right. — NNN-AGENCIES
