Despite past votes by the right-wing senator against marriage for all or against the opening of PMA, the National Assembly and the Senate have validated Emmanuel Macron’s proposed candidate for Defender of Rights, François-Noël Buffet.
A defender of LGBT rights? The question seemed absurd; it is now a reality. Despite a broad mobilization by human rights associations, the nomination of Senator François-Noël Buffet, proposed by Emmanuel Macron, was approved this Tuesday, July 21, by the parliamentarians. The 62-year-old conservative senator will thus indeed succeed Claire Hédon.
To pass the hurdle of Parliament, the candidate proposed by the executive had to be submitted to the legal affairs committees of the National Assembly and the Senate. At the end of two long hearings with lively exchanges, the majority of parliamentarians voted in his favor (43 votes to 39), announced Sandra Regol, vice-president of the Assembly’s Law Committee. To block the presidential proposal, negative votes would have to represent at least three-fifths of all votes cast in the two committees, i.e., at least 50 votes.
François-Noël Buffet says he has “evolved”
To urge parliamentarians to block this candidacy, around twenty activists from several associations such as Aides, Sidaction, SOS Racisme, Act Up-Paris or Inter-LGBT gathered Tuesday morning in the Luxembourg Gardens facing the Senate, unfurling a banner reading: “Defender of rights, stop the democratic shipwreck”. Previously, a petition to this effect had collected more than 150,000 signatures, in vain.
The senator from the Les Républicains (LR) party, who claims to adhere to a form of “social Gaullism,” has been criticized for his conservative positions. The former minister under Bruno Retailleau at the Interior had notably voiced opposition in 2013 to the law opening marriage and adoption to same-sex couples, then voted against expanding medically assisted procreation (PMA) to all women in 2021. More recently, he has also called for tightening State Medical Aid for undocumented migrants, and refused to vote for the constitutionalization of the right to abortion (IVG).
Before the deputies, the man who began his career as a lawyer at the Lyon bar affirmed that he had “evolved” on “a certain number of societal issues.” “I admit that things have evolved,” he elaborated regarding same-sex marriage. “It was a conviction, a doubt I had at that time, about the consequences and not about the principle.” And he added, before the Senate’s Law Committee, regarding abortion: “Never, ever will I question this absolutely fundamental right of women to dispose of their bodies.” A useful clarification, but whose necessity reinforces the sense of strangeness provoked by this nomination…
