The deputy RN causes an earthquake in the Assembly after remarks with a racist content. Grégoire de Fournas, who denounces a manipulation, is threatened with exclusion from the hemicycle.
By Charles Sapin
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LThe machine has just seriously seized up. Since their entry into the Assembly in large numbers, the deputies of the National Rally have used their new position as the leading opposition group to perfect the strategy of “de-demonization” and “institutionalization” of their movement. Not without some success. At least, until the release of one of their own, in the middle of the hemicycle, this Thursday. Who – extremely rare – caused a suspension of the session of questions to the government.
While rebellious France deputy Carlos Martens Bilongo questioned the government about the danger faced by the NGO SOS Méditerranée ship, carrying migrants seeking to land on European shores, RN deputy for Gironde, Grégoire de Fournas, said launched: “Let him return to Africa. “An interpellation interpreted on all the benches of the Assembly, except those of the RN, as racist, personally targeting the black deputy of La France insoumise.
“Today, I was sent back to my skin color. I was born in France, I am a French deputy and I did not think that today, in the National Assembly, they were going to insult me and all the people in this country who have this skin color, ”reacted the deputy Carlos Martens Bilongo. And this, despite the denials of the RN parliamentarian, who, in the Four Columns room, swore that his remarks were indeed “the SOS Méditerranée boat which cannot dock” and not his “colleague deputy of the Nation , which has the same legitimacy as [lui] to sit on these benches.
If the elected nationalist of Gironde is offended “that we seek to distort [ses] to make him say something disgusting,” officials across the political spectrum unanimously condemned his remarks. “Racism has no place in our democracy. The office of the Assembly will meet and of course will have to take the necessary sanctions”, thundered Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne leaving the hemicycle.
Internal message
“The RN threatens the cohesion of our country. We are going to ask for the strongest sanction against this deputy: exclusion for several months, ”said the president of the LFI group in the Assembly, Mathilde Panot, when, on the right, some preferred to dismiss France insoumise and National Rally back to back, like MEP LR Geoffroy Didier on Twitter: “If the far right has always liked to play with fire, the far left is the great champion of political manipulation. All these people use the people like a ping-pong ball. »
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If within the National Rally group no one dissociated himself from the remarks of their colleague, an internal message was initially sent to all the deputies to invite them to remain silent and not to respond to any journalistic solicitation. Proof of the embarrassment in which the words of the deputy Grégoire de Fournas have just put the movement. By giving the majority, as to other oppositions, the opportunity to collapse its patient work of “de-demonization” and “normalization” begun more than ten years ago. According to our information, if he was elected president of the National Rally, Jordan Bardella planned to appoint this Saturday Grégoire de Fournas spokesperson for the movement. Nothing is less certain from now on.
The office of the National Assembly will meet on the case of the deputy RN this Friday, at 2:30 p.m. Four types of sanctions can be pronounced against him: the call to order, the call to order with registration in the minutes, censorship or, the harshest, censorship with exclusion for fifteen days. The leaders of the groups of the majority as of LFI have already announced that they will demand the most severe.