Self-proclaimed "candidate of the truth," Jordan Bardella let his speech as an aspiring prime minister get bogged down in a lie: That of treating every citizen equally. "No right will be taken away from a single French man or woman, and our political action will work in all circumstances to maintain existing rights," promised the president of the Rassemblement National (RN, far-right) party, as he concluded the presentation of his policy platform for France's snap legislative elections, in Paris, on Monday, June 24.
However, if him and his far-right party were to come to power, millions of French citizens would risk losing one right, and not an insignificant one: The right to hold certain positions in the public sector. "With regard to dual nationals, I can confirm that the State's most strategic positions will be reserved for French citizens and French nationals," he said, standing by his decision to discriminate against French nationals who also have another nationality. Bardella would like to ban them from "strategic positions linked to the security or defense sectors," in the name of the fight against foreign interference. "In reality, it concerns very few positions and very few people, so it's anecdotal," he said.
Nevertheless, if applied to the letter, the RN's discrimination would affect millions of people in hundreds of thousands of jobs. A proposed referendum on immigration, which was set out in a bill tabled by RN leader Marine Le Pen in January, and which her party has dreamed of putting to the French people, would enshrine the possibility of prohibiting, by means of a simple "organic law," "access to jobs in (government) administrations, public companies and legal entities tasked with a public service mission for people who hold the nationality of another state" in the French Constitution.
Former secretary general of the RN group in the Assemblée Nationale, Renaud Labaye, spoke to Le Monde ahead of Bardella's press conference, to defend the extremely broad scope of application chosen for the measure. "We don't want to close any doors, and leave ourselves the possibility of legislating according to the news or the geopolitical situation," asserted Labaye, a close associate of Le Pen.
As evidence of the discomfort that this proposal has stirred up in the RN ranks, a number of senior party members have put forward different interpretations of this breach of equality in the media. For RN spokesman Sébastien Chenu, "when you have dual nationality, you have the same rights as a national citizen, because, by definition, you are French," except when it comes to filling certain "extremely strategic and specialized jobs, the list of which will be drawn up by decree."
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