“The lack of rigor, opacity and casualness led to the fiasco” of the Marianne Fund against separatism, set up in 2021 by Marlène Schiappa, the Senate inquiry committee devoted to this controversial device concluded on Thursday. “The report is without appeal on the drift of what we call ‘a political coup'”, asserted during a press conference the rapporteur of the commission, the senator (LR) Jean-François Husson.
This fund endowed with 2.5 million euros was created in April 2021 by Marlène Schiappa, then Minister Delegate for Citizenship, a few months after the assassination of history professor Samuel Paty by a young radicalized, to finance on internet of “counter discourse” to radical Islam.
“I have never seen her offer tangible elements”
“We have the feeling that the Marianne Fund was designed as a major communication operation” by the minister, Jean-François Husson observed again. The “promise” inherent in this device, “has not been kept, which is fully the political responsibility of the minister”, he continued.
“We interviewed her for a long time (…) I never saw her offer our commission of inquiry tangible elements. She had a lot of memory loss, there are certain speeches which are appalling to my point of view, and distressing”, curried the senator. For the rapporteur, some of the associations that have benefited from the fund “have done real work”, but this is not the case for the two main ones. In the end, the “label” of the Marianne Fund “becomes a real burden”, even “a ball attached to the allegory of the Republic”, according to him.