(Paris) The examination of the vaccine passport bill was again suspended in the middle of the night on Wednesday due to the storm caused in the National Assembly by President Emmanuel Macron who said he wanted to “piss off” the unvaccinated. .
This crisis, with the surge in contamination due to the Omicron variant – 271,000 on Tuesday, with a total of 3,665 people in critical care – will again be on the agenda of a defense council and a council of ministers Wednesday.
“The conditions for a calm work are not met”, declared shortly before 2 am the chairman of the session, Marc Le Fur (LR), announcing that the debates of this first reading would resume Wednesday at 3 pm.
“Unworthy remarks”, “insulting”, the elected opposition unleashed against the statements of Mr. Macron, multiplying the suspensions of meetings and requests for point of order, before demanding, in vain, the arrival of the Prime Minister Jean Castex, in a boosted atmosphere.
“The unvaccinated, I really want to piss them off. And so we will continue to do so, until the end. That’s the strategy, ”proclaimed the Head of State in an interview with Le Parisien. “When my freedom threatens the freedom of others, I become irresponsible. An irresponsible person is no longer a citizen, ”he added.
The boss of LR deputies, Damien Abad, castigated “unworthy, irresponsible and premeditated” remarks which fall under “childish cynicism”, while the president of the Republicans Christian Jacob “refused to endorse a text which aims to piss off the French ”.
At the other end of the chamber, Ugo bernalicis (LFI) denounced a “political crisis triggered by the presidential monarch, who allows himself to insult part of the French”. Mathilde Panot, president of the LFI group, estimated that the vaccine passport project now established a form of “deprivation of nationality”, like the Communist presidential candidate Fabien Roussel.
The bill on the health passport “is it a text to piss off more?, Or to piss off less? The French, he asked himself.
Several opposition politicians called in vain for the immediate arrival of Prime Minister Jean Castex in the hemicycle to explain the line of the executive after the words of Mr. Macron.
On the government bench, the Minister of Health Olivier Véran tried to explain the presidential word, in a more civilized language. “The evil that is ravaging our country is a vaccination which, although important, remains insufficient”, with “millions” of unvaccinated, he explained.
The words of Mr. Macron ruined a beginning of appeasement at the Palais Bourbon, already agitated the previous night by a surprise vote temporarily suspending work on this text, to the chagrin of the majority.
Early Tuesday evening, the deputies had managed to agree on the thorny issue of the vaccination passport for minors, postponed from 12 to 16 years for school trips and peri and extracurricular activities, but not for private activities such as going to school. restaurant.
A compromise voted almost unanimously (386 votes against 2), on the basis of an amendment by the socialist Cécile Untermaier, subamended by the government.
“Land together”
“It’s a good thing for all children and adolescents,” said Damien Abad for LR.
Mme Untermaier was delighted to see the deputies “land together” on this divisive issue of the age of the vaccination passport for young people.
“We manage to build a consensus of compromise”, added Guillaume Gouffier-Cha (LREM).
The vote the day before refusing to continue examining the text all night had already caused a stir.
The oppositions had mocked the inability of the majority to be present in sufficient numbers in the chamber to avoid this “snub”, and denounced the government’s lack of will for dialogue.
The government, for its part, accused the opposition, in particular the LR deputies, of seeking to make a political “coup” without regard to the seriousness of the health crisis.
Some 450 amendments remain on the menu for this first reading at the Palais Bourbon.
The executive aims for a final adoption at the end of the week or the beginning of next week of the bill transforming the health passport into a vaccination passport, before it comes into force on January 15.