Ally of France’s Le Pen, With a Nod to King Louis XVI, Will Spearhead an ‘Estates General’ on Immigration

Jordan Bardella is only 28 years old, but he is already making his mark as the relatively new president of France’s National Rally party. When the party’s previous president, Marine Le Pen, passed the reins to Mr. Bardella in 2022 so that she could focus on leading the party in the National Assembly, she gambled that giving a fresh face to the party’s nationalist agenda would be a jolt to the foundering liberalism championed by President Macron. Mr. Macron, who prior to presidential elections in 2027 does not wish to be considered a lame canard, tried to harness some of the National Rally’s momentum when he trotted out a new immigration bill last year. It is doubtful, though, that it could have passed without support from Ms. Le Pen. She, after all, is now more popular than he is.So it is with a certain amount of gusto that Mr. Bardella, seeking to capitalize on that unanticipated success, is taking a page out of French history to fashion a future in which Paris behaves less slavishly toward Brussels and leaves it for the French to set the course on major issues for themselves. Among those issues, few loom larger than that of illegal immigration. By deciding to organize “an estates general of immigration” at Paris on March 26, Mr. Bardella is signaling to the French center right that the National Rally and not the Renaissance party of Mr. Macron is the party that takes immigration the most seriously. The original Estates General, of course, was a sort of cobbled-together assembly under France’s ancien régime. The final one was that called by King Louis XVI in 1789, to decidedly mixed results: Once it disbanded the French Revolution broke out. Neither Ms. Le Pen nor Mr. Bardella are seeking to restore the monarchy — perish la pensé — but they do want to shake things up all the way to the Palais Élysée. The timing here is criticalL A month or so from now Europe will be even closer to the EU bloc’s parliamentary elections in June. In those, European right-wing parties will through their corresponding parliamentary coalitions be seeking to make inroads not only on traditional left-wing parties, but also on the center-right. In this respect, it is Mr. Bardella’s interest to show a French party called Les Républicains, led by François-Xavier Bellamy, who’s the boss. Originally President Chirac’s Gaullist Union for a Popular Movement, the LR party was in 2015 recast as the Républicains by President Sarkozy. It belongs, along with Germany’s Christian Democrats, to the center-right European People’s Party in the European Parliament. Mr. Bardella appears to be wanting to portray Mr. Bellamy as indentured to the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, and her policy of subsuming national immigration policies into the mechanics of a European supra-state. With international publicity for the event almost guaranteed, French voters will get that message loud and clear. Moreover, and contrary to a literal interpretation of its label, there is nothing “general” about the convocation of an estates general. Mr. Bardella will reportedly be taking aim at a recent decision by the Conseil d’État, France’s highest administrative authority, concerning asylum seekers. Earlier this month the Conseil struck down the so-called non-admission system, which had allowed for the immediate expulsion of migrants to their countries of origin. That decision means that French immigration authorities henceforth have to examine the case of each foreigner in an irregular situation on an individual basis, at the risk of overwhelming already saturated immigration processing capacities.It is worth noting that last year alone nearly 300,000 refugees arrived in Europe, most of them coming from across the Mediterranean. Greece and especially Italy are on the front lines of the crisis, but most of the migrants who arrive there are actually hoping to reach Germany, Britain, and France. According to the French Institute for Demographic Studies, more than a fifth of migrants in France are undocumented, though the true figure is likely higher. One of the speakers at the National Rally’s estates general next month, in addition to Mr. Bardella, will be the former head of Frontex, Fabrice Leggeri. Frontex is essentially the EU’s coast guard — as such, it is also on the front lines of the refugee crisis. Mr. Leggeri recently announced that he will be joining Ms. Le Pen’s and Mr. Bardella’s National Rally party list for the European elections in June. (Mr. Bardella is currently still a member of the European Parliament.)The National Rally is already tipped to win a third of the vote in those elections. As Mr. Bardella consolidates his position from Paris — with Ms. Le Pen right behind him — look for the scales to tip even more in their favor. That will leave Mr. Macron with a hollowed-out mandate, and possibly more French voters than ever before questioning the future of the European project.

Ally of France’s Le Pen, With a Nod to King Louis XVI, Will Spearhead an ‘Estates General’ on Immigration

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