Ihe mayor of Béziers Robert Ménard, close to the RN candidate Marine Le Pen, said Thursday, in the midst of the war in Ukraine, to be “ashamed” of his past remarks on the arrival of migrants fleeing the war in Syria and Iraq. “When I was elected mayor, two, three years later, there was the crisis in Syria and I made statements, the municipal newspaper made front pages, posters too, which I would not do again, and for tell you everything, which I am ashamed of having done, ”he said on Public Senate. A poster published then, showing African and North African migrants in front of a church, proclaimed: “The state imposes them on us. That’s it, they’re coming… Migrants in our city center! »
Robert Ménard, whose wife Emmanuelle Ménard, also a member of parliament, brought medicine, hygiene products and food to the border between Poland and Ukraine at the beginning of March, considered that the reception of Ukrainian refugees “is the minimum what we have to do”.
Zemmour, “hard, brittle, without many traces of humanity” and “unbearable”
The day before, the former president of Reporters Without Borders had estimated on LCI that his past statements, “it’s not a mistake, it’s a fault”. “There are not two kinds of victims, Christian Europeans who should be defended and non-European people who would be in the Middle East and whom we would have been right not to accept here,” he added. , regretting a “double standard not glorious”.
He also criticized Thursday “the speech” of the far-right candidate Éric Zemmour – “I don’t know whether to say friend; we were friends” – which he considered “hard, brittle, without many traces of humanity” and “unbearable”, while the RN candidate Marine Le Pen “is doing a better campaign”. As for Emmanuel Macron, “he does the job” on the Russian-Ukrainian file and “we must be behind him”, estimated Robert Ménard, who had already welcomed the management of the health crisis by the head of the State by approving the introduction of the vaccination pass.