What does a leap into the parliamentary unknown look like? No doubt like the session held on Monday, December 11 at the French Assemblée Nationale, where the government's immigration bill came up against the MPs who refused to examine it. With 270 votes to 265, the lawmakers adopted the motion for prior rejection put forward by the Greens, confirming the absence of a majority for Macron's government on its text "to control immigration" and "improve integration."

Shortly before 6 pm, the result of the vote appeared on the two screens in the chamber. The motion to reject passed by a margin of only 5 votes: the number of MPs absent on the benches of Macron's Renaissance group. The failure was all the more stunning as it set a new precedent, with a motion to reject torpedoing such a politically abrasive bill.

Elected representatives from the left-wing alliance Nouvelle Union Populaire Ecologique et Sociale (NUPES), the conservative Les Républicains (LR) and the far-right Rassemblement National (RN) rose to applaud the defeat of the government and its relative majority. The left-wing La France Insoumise (LFI) MPs ended by chanting in unison "Darmanin Démission!" (Darmanin Resign!). As for the Macronists, they left the chamber stunned. As did Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin, who immediately slipped away to go to the Elysée Palace to hand in his resignation to the president, who refused. "It's a cursed text, badly drafted from the start," sighed Renaissance MP Charles Sitzenstuhl after the vote.

Elected representatives from the presidential camp didn't see the debacle coming, confident after the overwhelming vote for the bill in the Assemblée's law commission on December 2. So much so that a minute before the vote, an adviser from the Ministry of Relations with Parliament assured to Renaud Labaye, Secretary General of the RN group at the Assemblée that, according to his calculations, the motion to reject would not pass. But this didn't take into account the increased mobilization of the opposition, from the RN, to the NUPES and to LR.

At 4 pm, the interior minister opened the debate in front of an exceptionally packed and surprisingly hostile chamber. A harbinger of things to come? Speaking up to cover the heckling of the opposition, Darmanin warned against "an unholy alliance" aimed at rejecting his bill before debating it. "Controlling migratory flows (...) is a debate that no one can reasonably dismiss out of hand without the Assemblée Nationale having had at least a few moments to discuss it." Whatever the case, the opposition agreed with the observation made by Green MP Benjamin Lucas, who tabled the motion for prior rejection: "The parliamentary discussion (...) would be nothing more than a vast haggle aimed at poaching the many, many individual votes you lack," he told Darmanin.

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