What are the promises of a former Prime Minister worth? Elisabeth Borne’s commitment to the right to reform State medical aid for undocumented foreigners “still stands,” government spokesperson Prisca Thévenot responded on Sunday evening. “We can actually look at whether there is a need to reform the AME, there is no taboo subject, a commitment is always obviously valid,” declared Ms. Thévenot on BFMTV.
A report at the center of the debate
However, she clarified that it was a question of “looking at” this aid “on the basis of the conclusions which were made by the report” of the former PS minister Claude Evin and the prefect Patrick Stefanini, an LR figure. According to their conclusions, the AME is a “useful health system” and “generally controlled”, but which “deserves to be adapted”.
The former Prime Minister, whom Gabriel Attal succeeded on Tuesday, had promised, in a letter to the President of the Senate Gérard Larcher, “to initiate a reform of the AME” at the beginning of 2024, responding to a request from the right in the framework of the negotiations then underway on the immigration bill. The Republicans in the Senate had reduced the AME to Emergency Medical Assistance. Several LR deputies have expressed their intention not to “give up” on this issue. “This is one of the laws that we are waiting for,” Annie Génevard told AFP on Friday.
Dati and the “traitors”
Regarding the surprise appointment of former Sarkozy Minister Rachida Dati for Culture, who had described members of the presidential party En Marche (now Renaissance) as “traitors”, she affirmed that “the most important thing today, to at a time when major political crises are affecting the largest democracies (…) it is above all about not being traitors to your country.”
Asked whether Ms. Dati was going to bring LR voters, she replied that she was not “doing mathematical politics” and that “when you join a government team, you embrace ideology, the capacity for action and the assessment too.”
Regarding the indictment of Ms. Dati for corruption, she highlighted the “presumption of innocence” while ruling that the 2017 rule according to which an indicted minister had to leave the government “was not obsolete “. But, she argued, the “country today is not what it was in 2017”, with “major challenges” and “political crises which are fueled by the extremes”.