Should politicians legislate?

The failures which led to the release of the alleged murderer of the young Filipina have led certain politicians to already want to legislate. The deputies of the Republican Right group chaired by Laurent Wauiquiez tabled, Thursday, September 26, a bill to extend the retention period of “dangerous illegal aliens“from 90 to 135 days, or even 210 days “for a foreigner convicted of a crime”. Likewise, to improve the implementation of the obligations to leave French territory (OQTF) issued to deportable foreigners, the Minister of the Interior Bruno Retailleau will bring together on Tuesday the prefects of the 21 departments most concerned.

Some are worried about seeing politicians legislate in a hurry, under the influence of emotion. The famous reflex, “a news item, a law”. In the past, some have sometimes overused it a little, but the emotion is legitimate, and all camps give in to it. The right, like the left. For example, we remember the image of the lifeless body of little Aylan, this three-year-old Syrian child, washed up in 2015 on a beach in Türkiye. Politicians took advantage of it to rightly warn about the fate of migrants in the Mediterranean. Likewise, the left seized on the emotion aroused by the death of young Nahel during a police check in 2023 to demand a change to the text authorizing police officers to use their weapons.

The flaws that Philippine’s alleged murderer took advantage of directly challenge the effectiveness of state services and the credibility of public speech. It is essential that those in power respond quickly. If there is a risk of political recovery, it lies elsewhere. Firstly in the use of caricatured vocabulary, with no relation to reality. According to Jordan Bardella, “our leaders” would deliberately leave “at liberty“those he calls “human bombs”. Then, in the so-called “essentialization” mechanism, which leads the far right to make the origin of an individual the cause of their action. Thus, for the same Jordan Bardella, foreigners in an irregular situation become “imported predators”. However, we know that more than 80% of sexual attackers are in the close, and often family, environment of the victim. A proportion illustrated at this very moment by the terrible Mazan trial, a case that the RN, for the moment, has not commented on.