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There are both government initiatives — with Macron trying to put us in the same basket as the Front National and Salvini as “populists” — and then an attempt in some media to import into France the debate going on the German left, revolving around Sahra Wagenknecht’s Aufstehen movement. If in its attempts to revitalize the German radical left it has taken some inspiration from us and from Bernie Sanders’s movement, and indeed we have contacts with some Die Linke MPs who are also part of Aufstehen, this is a very partial reading, a strategy of stripping pieces of text out of context and insisting that we take sides on this basis.

I think in this there is a lot of political maneuvering and a deal of bad faith, in the attempt to present us [La France Insoumise] as the “anti-immigrant left.” In fact, we have been very active in defense of migrants, I myself headed our group on asylum and immigration, which presented over a hundred amendments to the government’s own bill. This was one of the biggest political battles of the last parliamentary session, followed by the constitutionalization of the state of emergency and then the Benalla affair. We were rightly very active around this, showing those who accused us of not having a position on migration that we were in fact on the offensive.

But the debate in Germany served as a pretext to attack us with a variety of baseless polemics. The Communist Party leadership and other currents have launched a series of statements, demanding that we sign up to their positions. Certain forces want to instrumentalize this debate in order to undermine our stance and strip away a few votes among progressive and humanist voters sensitive to these questions. And while we do discuss whether to sign up to these statements, it is difficult to do so when they are so weak politically.

This also reflects the low level of mobilization and migrant solidarity, for these are pure petitions of principle, not even saying whom they are addressed to. They take a defeatist stance: for while we can agree on the need to take people in, we also need to address the wars and the free-trade deals that force so many to leave.

We don’t have a “no borders” position: we want to govern a nation state and to use the borders for an economic protectionism based on solidarity. For us, this isn’t a barrier to working together in struggles, for instance in showing solidarity with the Aquarius. But signing the same manifestos can’t be a condition of fighting on the same side.

Others are, I think, using this issue unfairly and mistakenly at a time when Macron is falsely presenting himself as the anti-Salvini even though he conducts exactly the same policy. And we need a more offensive and clear strategy than petitions can themselves offer. My own constituency lies across the 18th and 19th arrondissement of Paris, and the 18th is the place with the highest numbers of migrants arriving and the highest numbers sleeping in the streets. Over the last year I have been very much confronted with the question of migrant reception, working with associations on the ground. This makes it all the more insulting to then be accused of being against welcoming migrants, when we are fighting this battle all the time.

Seeking to break out of the French debate alone, we signed a joint article together with Spain’s Pablo Iglesias and Portugal’s Catarina Martins [of the Left Bloc], seeking a European response, which is what is needed. But at the same time, migration cannot be the central question of the European elections.

It is important to defend our own ideas and change people’s thinking on this question. We are for welcoming people in dignified conditions. But we also see how the powers-that-be instrumentalize this debate in a way that only feeds the Front National, at the end of twenty years in which people have been told that immigrants are the problem. Precisely our point is that they aren’t the problem, that the key issue in Europe is the distribution of wealth. That is at the center of our campaign for the European elections.