Macron has been humiliated by Marine Le Pen

Marine Le Pen celebrated what she called ‘an ideological victory’ on Tuesday evening after Emmanuel Macron’s government finally had its controversial immigration Bill approved. 

It was a day of jubilation also for the centre-right Republicans, who had formed the bulk of the negotiating team that forced the government to toughen parts of the Bill to make it more acceptable to them.  

The Bill was initially thrown out of parliament last week after the left and the right came together in an unprecedented show of solidarity to inflict a humiliating defeat on the president. They did so for different reasons: the left because they regarded the Bill as ‘racist and xenophobic’ and the right because they saw it as too lax. 

The amended Bill is more stringent than the first version, to the delight of the right and the despair of the left, including many MPs within Macron’s Renaissance party.