PARIS: France's new government is open to toughening immigration laws, the interior minister said on Wednesday, under pressure from the far-right National Rally (RN) after the arrest of a Moroccan male suspect in the murder of a 19-year-old female student in Paris.
Marine Le Pen's RN party has said in past weeks it reserved the right to withdraw its tacit backing for Prime Minister Michel Barnier's cabinet if its concerns over immigration and other issues were not addressed, saying the fate of the government was in its hands.
The RN has seized on the murder of the 19-year-old, identified by the authorities only by her first name, Philippine, whose body was found buried in a Paris park on Saturday, to push its agenda.
"It's time for this government to act: our compatriots are angry and will not be content with just words," RN chief Jordan Bardella said, accusing the state of being too soft on security and immigration after French media said the suspect was a 22-year-old migrant with a criminal record.
"Philippine's life was stolen from her by a Moroccan migrant targeted by an OQTF (obligation to leave France)," he said on social media platform X on Tuesday evening.
Marine Le Pen's RN party acquired kingmaker status by signalling support for a new coalition between centrists and conservatives, after a July election in which President Emmanuel Macron's centrist government suffered heavy losses.
On Wednesday morning, new Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau said: "If we need to change the rules, let's change them."
"Faced with such a tragedy, preceded by many others, we cannot just condemn it or be outraged," Retailleau said in a statement. "It's up to us, public officials, to ... update our legislation, to protect the French."
Retailleau, from the conservative Republicans party, had already signalled earlier this week that France was likely to see much tougher immigration and security measures.
Greens lawmaker Sandrine Rousseau warned against the far right using the murder to "spread its racist hatred".
The suspect had been due to be expelled from France after serving time in jail for rape, Le Monde newspaper and BFM TV said, adding that on June 20 he had been sent straight from jail to a detention centre for illegal migrants pending his expulsion.
A judge set him free on September 3, as the expulsion process was getting bogged down in administrative delays, under the condition that he check in regularly with police and stay on at a specific hotel, French media said. Three days later, the paperwork to expel him was completed, but the man had disappeared, they said.
France deports more non-EU citizens than any other European Union nation, official Eurostat data shows. But it issues so many expulsion orders - two to five times more than Germany in each quarter over the past two years - that its ratio of enforced expulsion orders is low.
In the first quarter of 2024, France ordered the expulsion of 34,190 non-EU citizens, or nearly a third of all expulsions ordered across the EU. It expelled 4,205 people in the same period. - Reuters
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