First rows in the National Assembly. According to information from Le Parisien, the government’s health bill was largely amputated last night, during the examination of the text at first reading, adopted by 221 votes against for 187 and 24 abstentions. This project is now in the hands of the Senate. Heated debates, which reflect “the difficulty of maneuvering for the government and the relative majority it has”, according to the Ile-de-France daily.

Olivier Véran, former Minister of Solidarity and Health, now government spokesman, said: “In concrete terms, we will work with the Senate this afternoon. We are confident in the possibility of convincing the senators”. For her part, Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne indicated her desire to “fight so that the spirit of responsibility prevails in the Senate” in a tweet. In our slideshow below, discover the five takeaways.

These debates are taking place as France has just exceeded the symbolic threshold of 150,000 people who have died as a result of Covid-19. According to the National Public Health Agency, the virus continues to circulate at very high levels in France, so that more than 182,000 new contaminations have been recorded in the last 24 hours. For the first week of July, the organization reports more than 8,000 new hospitalizations, including 750 in critical care. Figures constantly increasing in this period of the seventh epidemic wave.