“Let him return to Africa”: after the wave of indignation aroused by remarks deemed racist by deputy RN Grégoire de Fournas, the National Assembly voted on Friday to exclude him for 15 days, the heaviest disciplinary sanction possible. The deputies validated in the hemicycle this “censorship with exclusion” proposed by the office of the Assembly, its highest collegiate body. Grégoire de Fournas is prohibited from appearing at the Palais Bourbon for fifteen sitting days and is deprived of half of his parliamentary allowance for two months.
The President of the Assembly Yaël Braun-Pivet immediately asked the elected RN to leave the grounds of the Palais Bourbon. Grégoire de Fournas admitted having launched Thursday “that he return to Africa” during an intervention by the elected LFI Carlos Martens Bilongo, who spoke about the “drama of illegal immigration” during the question session at the government.
Several elected officials demand his resignation
The deputy for Gironde then categorically denied any racist character, assuring to speak of the humanitarian boat Ocean Viking stranded at sea with 234 migrants, and not of Carlos Martens Bilongo, elected black of Val-d’Oise. He denounced a “manipulation of LFI” aimed at lending him “disgusting remarks”.
The incident caused a wave of indignation and led to the premature end of the session of questions to the government, an extremely rare decision taken by the President of the Assembly. “Racism, whatever the target, is the negation of the republican values which bring us together in this hemicycle”, declared the holder of the perch on Friday, after the vote of the sanction.
Grégoire de Fournas is the second deputy temporarily excluded from the Palais Bourbon since the establishment of the Fifth Republic in 1958. The first was the PCF related elected Maxime Gremetz in March 2011, for an altercation because of… ministerial cars, badly parked according to him.
“I fully assume”
Nupes and the presidential camp pleaded for the “heaviest” sanction against the RN deputy. “The question of his resignation arises”, launched the Minister of the Interior Gérald Darmanin on Friday on BFMTV and RMC, adding that he would sign a petition from the Renaissance group demanding his departure. The Greens and elected LFI are also asking for his resignation.
The boss of the RN deputies Marine Le Pen left the meeting of the office before the decision. She criticizes a “procedure where we are judged by our political opponents” and a “lie” by LFI on the incident. Without the RNs, the other elected officials unanimously supported the sanction.
At the initiative of LFI, a rally in support of MP Carlos Martens Bilongo was held at midday near the Assembly, bringing together a few hundred people. “My person was attacked but also people who look like me. Millions of French people were attacked yesterday. In 2022, we must not give way to these ideas”, affirmed the deputy from Ile-de-France, surrounded by elected representatives from the left and by Jean-Luc Melenchon.
On BFMTV on Friday, Grégoire de Fournas, who “fully assumes his remarks on anarchic migration policy”, ruled out any resignation and accuses Carlos Martens Bilongo of having “felt a blow to play in community victimization”. The latter castigates the “racist sentence” from an elected member of a far-right party who “has never changed”.
The vice-president of the RN evokes a “lack of humanity”
After the sanction, the RN deputy repeated himself “totally innocent”: “I feel this sanction of incredible harshness with great injustice. But respectful of the institution, I submit to it.” Winegrower in the Médoc, Grégoire de Fournas is the author of a series of tendentious tweets in the past. “In Africa, they all love France and its allowances. We welcome all of Africa?!”, He tweeted in 2017; and in January 2022: “In response to the expulsion of our ambassador to Mali, all Malians must be expelled from France!”.
The exit of Grégoire de Fournas in the hemicycle weakens the notabilisation strategy claimed by the troops of Marine Le Pen, since the unprecedented election of 89 RN deputies in June. “Everyone is united. And everyone says to themselves that it was avoidable, because it is always more interesting to make a constructed intervention” in the hemicycle, affirms to AFP the deputy RN Pierre Meurin, who denounces “a double standard” with the National Rally.
The vice-president of the party David Rachline regretted “the lack of humanity” of the remarks of Grégoire de Fournas. “We don’t express ourselves like that about human beings, especially in the Assembly,” he told the Obs.