VIDEO. The debate of the deputies on the meal at 1€ for all the students

Only precarious and scholarship students will be able to continue to benefit from meals at 1 euro. This Thursday, February 6, the deputies examined a socialist proposal allowing all students, regardless of their income or the situation of their parents, to access meals at low cost. A situation echoing what was put in place during the Covid-19 crisis. But the project was refused by 184 votes against, facing 183 votes for. With just one vote, the deputies preferred to perpetuate the current regulations, which only allow precarious and scholarship students to access Crous meals at 1 euro. Here is what was said during the debate in the National Assembly.

“Other non-scholarship students may indeed be in trouble”

For some MPs, allowing a single rate for all students represents a demagogic and infantilizing proposal, because it does not allow young people to fend for themselves and finance their studies on their own. “I was on a scholarship, like many. I knew the galley, the odd jobs, parents who could not finance the studies. Since when did it become abnormal to have to make an effort to succeed? Since when did it become abnormal to have to fight to finance your studies? It’s even the surest way to want to succeed and be proud to do it on your own.”, thinks Alexandre Portier, Deputy LR.

Others contradict this argument, and think that this measure would make it possible to remove more than a financial burden on the backs of young people, as explained by Louis Boyard, Deputy LFI. “€563 of rent to pay on average, €250 of hygiene and food products, €30 of Internet and telephone, €100 of gas and electricity, €30 of transport. What family is able to give 973 € each month to their child so that he can have even the minimum need to live during his studies? Almost no family can do that. And that’s what the students are screaming at you. And you answer them, with your bourgeois arrogance: you just have to work alongside your studies.”

Caroline Parmentier, National Rally MP, offers another alternative to this law: “We therefore propose that a meal distributed by a Crous cannot exceed €2 for all other students, compared to €3.30 today. Other non-grant-funded students may in fact be in difficulty, without necessarily being in a very precarious situation, I am thinking, for example, of those students whose parents’ tax household is slightly above €33,100 and whose neither scholarship student status nor serious financial difficulties are recognized by the CROUS.”