He is said to be very "tried" since his trip to cyclone-ravaged Mayotte, in December 2024. Yet is Prime Minister François Bayrou's concern about the dramatic situation in the overseas territory, where migrants, many of them from nearby Comoros, have packed into slums, enough to justify the use of a term so dear to the far right? Bayrou's remarks on a migratory "submersion" fueled clashes in Parliament on Tuesday, as the Socialists, an opposition party key to his survival, expressed outrage at the language he had used the night before in a long interview on the news channel LCI.

"Foreign contributions are positives for a people, so long as they don't exceed a proportion," Bayrou had said on LCI. In his government policy statement, on January 14, he had explored a similar idea, stating that "a foreign family settling in a Pyrenées or Cévennes village" would elicit "generosity" and mutual aid from local residents, but that with "30 families moving in the village would feel threatened." On LCI, he went further, though: "From the moment you have the feeling of submersion, of no longer recognizing your country, no longer recognizing the way of life or the culture. From that instant, you get rejection. That's the zone we're in."

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