Lucie Castets. © SIPA
Forced flashback. A few days after declaring on BFMTV that it was necessary to regularize all illegal immigrants, whether they work or not, Lucie Castets, first minister of the New Popular Front (NFP), made an about-face. Faced with the storm caused, including within the left, where certain socialists, Olivier Faure and Ségolène Royal in the lead, hastened to distance themselves, Castets is trying to refocus. In an interview given to Release this Friday, she clumsily defends herself: “The question “to regularize everyone or not?” is not the right one » A rhetorical pirouette to make people forget a political slip-up which has offended even his own allies.
Close to Anne Hidalgo, Lucie Castets defends a discourse of variable geometry. On the one hand, she pleads for the regularization of certain people who have been in France for decades, having “built their lives” in the territory and deserving, according to her, a legal status. But on the other hand, she slows down as soon as we talk to her about regularizing ” everyone “. “It can’t be automatic”she decides, while listing a series of criteria as vague as they are arbitrary: the duration of presence in France, the schooling of the children, or even the family situation. As if that were enough to mask a blatant lack of coherent vision.
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But that’s not all. While his intervention fell into full media chaos, just before the announcement of the arrest in Switzerland of the main suspect in the murder of the young Filipina, Castets struggled to avoid the label of laxity that his opponents were quick to label. stick to him. “If a person under OQTF has already been convicted of serious offenses, they should not be subject to regularization”she specifies, clumsily trying to save the furniture after the bitter failure of her appointment to Matignon by Emmanuel Macron. A comeback that looks more like a desperate attempt to stay in the game than a real stand.
