PARIS, Nov 4 (Reuters) – National Rally MP Grégoire de Fournas, accused of making racist remarks in session, has been temporarily expelled from the Palais-Bourbon, Assembly President Yaël Braun-Pivet announced on Friday. .
The decision was confirmed by a vote in the hemicycle, during which the deputies in favor of the sanction, the heaviest provided for by the regulations, stood up.
The president asked Grégoire de Fournas, elected from Gironde, to leave the hemicycle before speaking.
“Free democratic debate cannot allow everything (…) and especially not racism”, said Yaël Braun-Pivet.
After hearing Grégoire de Fournas, the office of the Assembly decided to pronounce against him a “censure with temporary exclusion”, which provides for a reduction by half of his parliamentary allowance for two months and the prohibition to participate in parliamentary work or to appear at the Palais-Bourbon for a fortnight.
This is only the second time that such a sanction has been imposed since 1958.
According to two participants in the meeting of the Bureau of the Assembly, the decision was taken unanimously, the National Rally deputies present having chosen to leave the room and not to participate in the vote.
The sanction corresponds to “what we asked for”, declared Mathilde Panot, president of the LFI group.
For her part, the president of the RN group, Marine Le Pen, denounced a “political” procedure.
“If each time a statement lacks finesse, it had to be excluded from the National Assembly, we would feel comfortable, we would have room,” she said. to the press.
According to the report of the session of questions to the government on Thursday, Grégoire de Fournas launched “Let him return to Africa” during an intervention by the deputy La France insoumise (LFI) of Val-d’Oise, Carlos Martens Bilongo, who challenged the government on the rescue operations of migrants in the Mediterranean.
DEMONSTRATION IN FRONT OF THE ASSEMBLY
The RN camp affirms that the incriminated deputy was talking about the migrant boat mentioned by the elected LFI and was not targeting the latter, to which Grégoire de Fournas sent a message, consulted by Reuters, in which he said in particular “sorry about the misunderstanding” aroused by his remarks.
Several members of the government and non-RN deputies of the National Assembly strongly protested after the incident, while the Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, spoke of “ordinary racism”.
At the beginning of the afternoon, before the meeting of the bureau of the Assembly, a protest demonstration at the call of La France insoumise brought together a few hundred people near the Palais-Bourbon, including the deputy Carlos Balongo and the rebellious leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
“I am a black-skinned person and these words, I have heard them before, it reminded me of episodes in my life that I did not like and for me, hearing them “National Assembly is shocking,” Pedro Filipe, a 19-year-old law student from Troyes (Aube), told Reuters.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon called for “the most severe sanction for the person who is guilty of the racist remarks that we have heard. These remarks are incompatible with the identity of our common homeland and the place in which this sentence was pronounced”. “Out!” he shouted to applause.
The gathering ended with a sung Marseillaise. (Written by Myriam Rivet and Elizabeth Pineau, edited by Marc Angrand)