Édouard Philippe spent Friday and Saturday in Mayotte, the first stop of a political return that also takes him to La Réunion, and he opened it on immigration. Speaking to France Mayotte Matin, the Horizons candidate for 2027 said the urgent thing was to close the valves on immigration, and to close them completely. Euronews sets out what that means as policy: registration of new asylum claims in Mayotte suspended for the whole of the next five-year term, so long as he judges the territory saturated; a moratorium on every immigration route including family immigration; and a French return centre in East Africa to make removals easier.
On Saturday, on the ground, he put it more bluntly. BFMTV quotes him saying that in Mayotte all forms of immigration, legal and illegal, must be stopped, that the issuing of residence permits for family reunification must stop, and that France must, in his words, put more muscle into its game.
The part that decides how large this proposal actually is sits underneath it. Birthright citizenship in Mayotte is already narrower than in the rest of France, and has been narrowed twice. Since 2018 a child born there to foreign parents has needed at least one parent lawfully resident in France for more than three months at the time of birth. The law of 12 May 2025 went further: except where parentage is established for only one parent, both parents must now have been lawfully resident for at least a year at the birth, and a decree in force since July 2026 set out how. What Philippe proposes is to suspend the principle in Mayotte outright for several years, which would mean changing the framework a third time.
The rest of his visit was about the archipelago's other emergency. Mayotte was hit by cyclone Chido in December 2024, on top of poverty, a housing shortage and a water supply that was already failing, and Saturday was given over to that: a crossing by barge to the Combani hill reservoir to meet the water authority, then agriculture, then Sada, where he visited a nursery school threatened by erosion and reconstruction sites including a new pitch and a future town hall, ending with local business at the Dembéni technology park.
The reaction arrived faster than the detail. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, asked by TF1, said the debate itself did not bother him but the answer did — you say you will stop immigration, how, throw people into the sea? — and called for talking to the Comoros. Philippe's reply was that Mélenchon should come to Mayotte and see. The Socialist leader Olivier Faure wrote that some people begin their political year by hunting on the far right's ground; the party's spokesman Arthur Delaporte said on BFMTV that Philippe was courting the Rassemblement National by raising the suspension of asylum and of birthright citizenship. The LFI deputy Thomas Portes called it irresponsible and said the priority for France's poorest department was republican equality. Sylvain Berrios, an Horizons deputy, answered that the subject is already in the debate and does not need putting there.
Two other things came out of the same day. Philippe said he would telephone Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu about Mayotte, and, asked whether Lecornu might run himself, said he did not believe he wanted to. On Gabriel Attal's proposal of a gathering of the right in February, he said February was late, said the gathering would happen, and gave no date. He declined to name anyone for Matignon, although Gérald Darmanin — who gave up his own candidacy to back him days earlier — has suggested Xavier Bertrand.
Why it is on the board
Second on BFMTV's most-read list when we collected, with two clips on the same visit in the French video lens.
What the two sources carry differs in a way worth naming. Euronews wrote the visit as a programme — the asylum suspension, the moratorium, the return centre, and the legal history the proposal sits on. BFMTV's live page carried the proposal in a sentence, then five separate entries in which other politicians answered it — Faure, Berrios, Portes, Mélenchon, Delaporte — and two more in which Philippe answered them back. The same day produces a policy document in one place and an argument in the other.
확인: Euronews · BFMTV