The RN sets a trap for the right and for the friends of Édouard Philippe

With its bill to repeal the pension reform, the National Rally is setting a trap for the left, but it is setting another trap for the right by wanting to reinstate minimum sentences.

Marine Le Pen’s troops want to play with the nerves of their adversaries on October 31, the date on which the RN will have control over the agenda of the Assembly via its “parliamentary niche”The RN group denies making it a festival of pitfalls, and prefers to speak of a “festival of measures expected by the French”.

RN MPs intend to submit a bill to reinstate minimum sentences, minimum sentences for repeat offenders, particularly when law enforcement officers are attacked. The RN is not inventing anything since it was Nicolas Sarkozy who introduced minimum sentences in 2007, before they were abolished by François Hollande.

The question will therefore arise for the right to vote for this text. All the more so since the reestablishment of minimum sentences appears in black and white in the legislative pact presented by Laurent Wauquiez’s group this summer, these measures to which the right is attached at all costs in the new mandate. So what to do in the face of the RN proposal? “That’s a good question,” is the answer from the Republican Right group, the new name for the LR in parliament. Since Laurent Wauquiez took the reins of the group, there is, at this stage, no doctrine on whether or not to vote for a text from the National Rally. Some right-wing MPs do not see themselves voting for a text from the far right, others assure that they have no worries. “It has often happened that we vote on the texts of another group taking up our proposals, recalls an elected official, but we must see the details of the RN text”.

Elected officials imagine another way out of the trap: “a comprehensive security bill”. A bill comes from the government, when the bills are of parliamentary origin. They thus pass the buck to the future government of Michel Barnier, where LR hopes to secure sovereign positions to implement a firm policy.

This RN bill will also raise questions for Édouard Philippe’s troops. “The RN deliberately puts out the most annoying texts possible,” plague a Horizons executive, because the group had defended, in vain, a bill to reinstate minimum sentences in spring 2023. This text had come up against the refusal of the government and the former majority. At Horizons, the strategy to adopt has not yet been decided. A close friend of Marine Le Pen intends in any case to measure on this occasion “the degree of sectarianism” of one and the other, while the RN had supported the attempt of the friends of Édouard Philippe.