After the “curtain roll”, lower the curtain. The bill which aims to transform the health pass into a vaccination pass was finally adopted at first reading by the deputies around 5.30 am, Thursday, January 6, with 214 votes in favor, 93 votes once morest and 27 abstentions. A long night of debates and a work at the step of load allowed the deputies to come to the end of the 448 amendments which remained to be examined during Wednesday’s sitting. From now on, the text is awaited by the senators who will begin to examine it on Monday January 10 in committee, following hearing the Minister of Health and Solidarity, Olivier Véran.
The latter pushed behind the scenes for the deputies to continue examining the bill until the end of the night, while the oppositions had protested on Monday on the increasingly constrained conditions of the parliamentary debate and rejected the idea of a early morning vote, ” in catimini “.
Mr. Véran has never ceased to recall the urgency of the health situation during the debates while the Covid-19 epidemic is experiencing an unprecedented revival in the country, following having crossed a record threshold of 332,000 cases on Wednesday. But the argument well established in two years of the emergency was not enough to win the support of the different political families, especially three months before the presidential election.
LRs divided into three blocks
Voting is quite revealing of the positions taken by the various parliamentary groups during these three days and three nights under tension at the Palais-Bourbon. If the majority (LRM-MoDem-Agir), as usual, united behind the executive (with only three votes once morest the side of the presidential party out of 137 votes), some oppositions appear more divided within them on this tool now favored by the government in its health strategy.
If, unsurprisingly, the deputies La France insoumise (LFI), communists and non-registered, far-right or environmentalists voted once morest the vaccine pass, on the side of the Socialist deputies and especially among the elected Republicans (LR), it is another story. The first, in favor of compulsory vaccination since the start of the health crisis, voted for half of them once morest the text (10 once morest, 7 for, 3 abstentions). The LRs emerge divided into three almost equal blocks (28 for, 24 once morest and 23 abstentions). “We had a hell of a performance because we finally have two thirds of the group who are not opposed to the vaccination pass”, believes the president of the LR group in the National Assembly, Damien Abad, preferring to see the glass half full rather than half empty for his candidate, Valérie Pécresse.
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