“Let them go back to Africa!” This short sentence shouted in the National Assembly during a question asked by LFI deputy Carlos Martens Bilongo on the conditions of crossings for migrants from North Africa, caused a stir. Remarks considered racist by a very large part of the deputies present in the hemicycle. Result, the deputy at the origin of this sentence, Grégoire De Fournas, was censored. He will not be able to go to the hemicycle of the Assembly for two weeks and will receive half of his parliamentary allowance for two months.
“I wrote it, I claimed it”
“I was a deputy so before taking a position, I read the analytical report”, explains Nadine Morano at the microphone of Europe 1. “And I saw that this deputy who is not from my political family had said ‘they are smugglers’, before this sentence. So, if we had to go to trial, we would spend our lives sanctioning and flouting freedom of expression,” said MEP LR.
For the former minister, “there was nothing” that relates to racism in the words of the deputy RN. “When he says ‘they go back to Africa (the migrants), well I wrote it down, I asked for it and I spoke about it in the Pan-African Parliament,’ she says. “I spoke on the subject in front of the African deputies and I told them ‘it is no longer possible, it is your children, it is the boys who are leaving’, she warned.
Helping African development
“I ask very concretely this morning, as I said before the Pan-African Parliament, that the African Union, which represents the 55 African states, be made responsible on the migration issue”, explains Nadine Morano. “At one point, I say stop. It’s up to Africa to take care of these citizens.”
But the MEP also pleads for increased aid from Europeans to Africans, to help the continent develop as quickly as possible. “There is a real challenge on this subject. There is a crying lack of development, especially in electricity. So until we understand that in order to resolve the problem of immigration from North Africa”, we must promote the development of the African continent, “we will not succeed”, she concludes at the microphone of Europe 1.