The French president, François Hollande, has scrapped plans to strip convicted terrorists with dual nationality of their French passports and deport them.

The controversial proposal, announced after last November’s terrorist attacks in Paris, was to be enshrined in France’s constitution but had profoundly split his own Socialist government and was opposed by the centre-right opposition.

Hollande was accused of betraying the principles of the republic with kneejerk politics more suited to the far right than a Socialist leader.

It also led to the January resignation of the justice minister, Christiane Taubira, who tweeted afterwards: “Sometimes to resist is to stay. Sometimes to resist is to leave.”

The climbdown is deeply damaging for Hollande, who is looking increasingly isolated, unpopular and beleaguered a year away from a presidential election.

A recent poll suggested his popularity had sunk to a near record low again in March after a brief spike following 13 November, when a series of shootings and suicide bombings in the French capital left 130 dead and hundreds injured.

A survey by Ipsos showed the president’s approval rating dropped five percentage points to 15% in March, just two points off his all-time low of 13% last September.

Hollande has yet to announce whether he will seek re-election for a second term next May, but is coming under increasing pressure from his own side with divisive measures, including new working practice legislation, and his failure to curb unemployment.

Hollande had also wanted to enshrine in the constitution the state of emergency and its controversial special powers, which include detaining suspects and searching properties without prior approval from a judge, brought in supposedly to beef up security after the attacks.



However, the president was forced to abandon both ideas on Wednesday after meeting the heads of both houses of the French parliament, the Assemblée Nationale and the Sénat.

“A compromise appears out of reach over the stripping of nationality for terrorists,” Hollande said. He sought to blame the main opposition party, Les Républicains, led by former president Nicolas Sarkozy.

“I also note that a section of the opposition is hostile to any review of the constitution whether it be on the state of emergency or the reform of the magistrature. It’s an attitude I deeply regret,” Hollande added. “I have decided to end this constitutional debate.”

Hollande said that he would not deviate from commitments to “ensure the security of our country”.

Any changes to France’s constitution must be approved by three-fifths of French MPs and senators. A special Congress of Versailles of all parliament members was due to consider the issue next month, but will now be cancelled.

Human rights organisations said the move to remove French nationality from convicted terrorists would be unconstitutional in creating two different classes of French citizenship, in contravention of the constitution’s founding principle of equality.

They also warned it risked pushing vulnerable youngsters, many of them with North African roots, towards extremism.

Under current French law nobody can be stripped of their French nationality if it would leave them stateless, but those who have acquired French citizenship and are convicted of treason or terrorism can lose it. The measure has only been applied to 13 naturalised people with terrorism convictions since 1996.

Hollande’s proposal would have extended the punitive measure to those with dual nationality who were born in France.

Sarkozy, who had originally supported convicted terrorists losing their French nationality, threw the blame back into Hollande’s court, accusing him of having “created the conditions” for the proposal’s failure because he had “promised everything and its opposite”.

“The reality is that he has condemned the country to a standstill and immobility,” Sarkozy said.

Marine Le Pen, president of the Front National, who partially supported bi-nationals being stripped of French nationality if convicted, declared the scrapping of the idea “an exceptionally heavy failure for a president”.

After the release of the opinion poll, Ipsos analysts Brice Teinturier and Jean-François Doridot noted that “above all, it’s on the left that negative views of Hollande are growing, including from within his own Socialist party”.

The survey showed prime minister Manuel Valls’s popularity had plummeted nine percentage points to 26%, the lowest since he was appointed in 2014.

The left-leaning magazine Nouvel Obs denounced what it called “pure political manoeuvring” over the constitution row and described Hollande’s announcement on Wednesday as “pathetic”.



