Emmanuel Macron has decided to appoint Michel Barnier as Prime Minister. After this announcement, several pieces of information, which deserve to be verified, have circulated about him.
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Since the announcement of Michel Barnier’s appointment on Thursday, September 5, a lot of information has circulated about the new Prime Minister on social networks. Le Vrai ou Faux has verified two of them and found old inaccurate statements by Michel Barnier.
The accusation comes from the left. “Michel Barnier has already stolen an election”asserted Jean-Luc Mélenchon, in a publication on the social network X, “After the vote against the European Constitution in 2005, he prepared the vote on the same text at the Congress of the Parliament”.
Michel Barnier has already stolen an election.
After the vote against the European Constitution in 2005, he prepared the vote on the same text at the Congress of the Parliament.
He voted against the decriminalization of homosexuality. What is the meaning of such a message?#PrimeMinister pic.twitter.com/W5i2gjWweE
— Jean-Luc Mélenchon (@JLMelenchon) September 5, 2024
The founder of La France insoumise refers to what Michel Barnier was doing in the 2000s. In 2005, he was Minister of Foreign Affairs and it was he who presented to the French the constitutional treaty that was to give a Constitution to Europe. The French voted against it, and he lost his job. But two years later, he was part of a group of advisers to Nicolas Sarkozy when he was President of the Republic. Nicolas Sarkozy was then working on the Treaty of Lisbon, which wanted to transform the European institutions, despite the opposition of the voters.
This is why Jean-Luc Mélenchon speaks of a “flight” of the election. But it is important to remember that this treaty was not passed by force, it was adopted by the French parliamentarians meeting in Congress at Versailles. Talking about “flight”it’s a matter of opinion.
It’s true, Michel Barnier voted against the decriminalization of homosexuality. That was in 1981. At the time, Michel Barnier was an RPR MP for Savoie and, like all the MPs in his party except one, he voted against the law that would put an end to the criminalization of homosexuality. This vote worried the left. After Michel Barnier’s appointment, Inter LGBT said: “dismayed”in a message on X.
Inter-LGBT is dismayed by the appointment as Prime Minister of Michel Barnier, who opposed the decriminalization of homosexuality in 1981. A sign that is clearer than ever that the government will be hostile to our rights and existence!
— Inter-LGBT (@InterLGBT) September 5, 2024
The law brought by the left was passed anyway. It made it possible to align the sexual majority of homosexuals with that of heterosexuals. In other words, before the law, the sexual majority was set at 21 years old to have relations with a person of the same sex, against 15 years old for a person of the opposite sex. After the law, there was only one sexual majority at 15 years old, regardless of orientation.
A few years later, in 1999, while he was a senator, Michel Barnier also voted against the creation of the civil solidarity pact (Pacs), open to couples of different sexes as well as same-sex octuplets. The Senate, with a right-wing majority, had led a long fight against this text.
In 2021, when he was a candidate in the right-wing primary for the presidential election, Michel Barnier called for the return of the “double penalty”, which allows the expulsion of a foreigner who has been convicted in France.
Except that this system has never been eliminated, as Le Vrai ou Faux de franceinfo already indicated that year. It existed in 2021 and it still exists. The “double penalty” is guaranteed in article 131-30 of the Penal Code: “A ban from French territory may be imposed, either permanently or for a period of ten years, on any foreigner guilty of a crime or offence. Banning from the territory automatically results in the convicted person being returned to the border at the end of their prison sentence.”
Right-wing politicians often claim that it was abolished in 2003, when it was only amended at the time by Nicolas Sarkozy, then Minister of the Interior. He set conditions. For example, convicted foreigners responsible for the education of a child cannot be expelled.
The same year, Michel Barnier claimed that the French Constitution took precedence over European law. He was then criticized by the fact-checkers of AFP Factuel.
The press agency explained that things were not so simple, in reality, and that its assertion was rather false. Several lawyers explain that the Constitutional Council and the Council of State maintain a certain vagueness on this subject, on which the French courts sometimes surf when rendering their decisions. But from the point of view of Europe, the situation is very clear and European law takes precedence over the rights of the member countries.