“Go back to Africa” Grégoire de Fournas tells Carlos Martens Bilongo.
During a parliamentary session that was televised to the public on Thursday, a French politician with a right-wing political ideology stirred an uproar by shouting “Go back to Africa” in response to comments made by a black lawmaker.
During a session of the National Assembly, which is the lower house of parliament, Grégoire de Fournas, a parliamentary representative for the National Rally (RN) party, interrupted Carlos Martens Bilongo, a parliamentary representative for the far-left party France Unbowed (LFI).
In his message, Bilongo asked the French government to work with other European Union countries, especially Italy and its newly elected far-right Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, to help several hundred African migrants who had been rescued from the Mediterranean Sea.
De Fournas yelled out throughout the conversation, “Go back to Africa!”
The session was stopped right away while Yal Braun-Pivet, the President of the National Assembly, tried to get the room back in order after chaos broke out.
Although Bilongo and his party have characterized the yell as a racist personal assault, de Fournas’ party has maintained that the interjection was actually meant for the migrants that were being discussed. Bilongo and his party have labeled the cry a racist personal attack.
“Today, some people once again put my skin color at the center of a debate. I’m born in France and I am a French lawmaker and I didn’t think that today I will be insulted [like this] at the National Assembly,” Bilongo told reporters after the incident.
The leader of the far-left France Unbowed group in the National Assembly, Mathilde Panot, has urged that de Fournas be expelled from the National Assembly, which is the harshest punishment that can be given to a French politician. “Racists like him have no place in our parliament,” Panot tweeted.
De Fournas tweeted that he was talking to migrants and that France Unbowed had “hijacked” his remarks in a “disgraceful deception” De Fournas maintained that he was referring to migrants in his tweet.
“My answer concerned the boat and the migrants, obviously not my colleague,” he tweeted.
According to French phonetic rules, there is little audible difference between the sentences, “He should go back to Africa” and “They should go back to Africa” as de Fournas expressed them.
In a tweet, Marine Le Pen, who leads the party group in the French lower chamber for the far-right National Rally (RN), said that she supported de Fournas.
“Grégoire de Fournas obviously spoke about the migrants transported in boats by the NGOs that our colleague mentioned in his question to the government. The polemic created by our political opponents is crude and will not deceive the French,” she wrote.
After the meeting was over, Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne addressed the media and stated that “racism has no place in our democracy.”
On Friday, a meeting of the parliament will be held to select the appropriate sentence for de Fournas. According to a CNN affiliate, Maxime Gremetz, a communist lawmaker, was the only person in the history of the French Fifth Republic to ever be expelled from the parliament for disrupting a parliamentary session. The expulsion was the harshest punishment that could be given to a lawmaker for his actions in the legislature.
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