Immigration is once again at the heart of French political debate. Éric Lombard, the minister for the economy, made his presence felt by explaining on television that France needed more and more immigrants. When Rassemblement National (RN) president Jordan Bardella presented his own New Year’s greetings to the press, he spelled out how the left-wing temptations of François Bayrou’s government is putting its survival at risk more than ever.
While Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau is struggling to get the country out of the all-immigration impasse it has been locked in for decades, his colleague Lombard, has just cruelly rebuffed him. Retailleau, like two thirds of the French people, believes that immigration “is not an opportunity for France,” Lombard, however, sticks with the exact opposite. In a TV interview, he argued that “we can have different assessments within a government.” and that France must “of course” remain a country of immigration, which remains necessary “to fill jobs in companies, factories and hospitals.”
Eugénie Bastié, a journalist at Le Figaro, described the comments as “cynical and irresponsible.”
Migrants are seen as cannon fodder for society’s dirty work. For these petty technocrats, populations are interchangeable boxes on Excel spreadsheets, and they ignore the cultural dimension of immigration, its security consequences and the identity divides it creates. Our Western economies, focused exclusively on services and consumption, are addicted to immigration. This addiction is unsustainable in the long term and we are already paying the price.
On the morning of Monday, January 27th, Bardella also voiced such concerns during his 2025 address to journalists, in the face of a government that is constantly giving “pledges to the Left” and plunging the country into “worrying inertia” with a “façade of soft consensus and compromise that satisfies no one.”
While Bardella believes that the minister of the interior is “sincere” in his firm stance on immigration, he adds that “his communication effects, which are designed to put the RN electorate to sleep, won’t fool anyone.” Bardella is firmly in favour of holding a referendum on immigration—an idea shared by Retailleau but condemned by the rest of the government.
Bardella did not make a clear statement on the prospect of the Bayrou government facing censure on the budget issue. “For us, censure is not a toy. And for us, censure is not an end in itself,” he reiterated.
Marine Le Pen’s party is calling for a new dissolution of the National Assembly to end the instability—which constitutionally cannot take place before the summer of 2025. “Only a return to the people will give the country a stable majority,” Bardella insisted. With this in mind, the RN is getting ready and has already started to select its candidates.
On the evening of January 27th, Prime Minister Bayrou, as guest on the LCI news channel, being aware of these tensions, tried to find a cautious point of balance that would be satisfactory to listeners. Let us add, a minority of whom now intend to follow the minister of the economy down the path of ever more immigration. Bayrou explained that immigration “is one of the most important issues before us.”
While there are, in his view, jobs that no French are willing to fill, François Bayrou pointed out that “foreign contributions are positive for a people provided that they do not exceed a certain proportion.” The PM continued along the same path: “The meeting of cultures is positive, but as soon as you have the impression of submersion, there is rejection. In France, we’re getting close to that.” His comments were almost instantly condemned by the President of the National Assembly, Yaël Braun-Pivet.
Of course, all this verbiage remains at the level of declarations of intent, justifying Bardella’s description of the team in place as a “ministry of words.”