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After the wave of indignation caused by the comments of the Grégoire de Fournas National Group deputy, the French National Assembly decided on Friday to temporarily disqualify the deputy for two weeks, accused of racism by the other parliamentary groups.
The penalty fell. The French deputy of the National Group (RN) Grégoire de Fournas, accused of having made racist comments during a session, has been temporarily excluded from the Bourbon Palace, as announced on Friday, November 4, by the president of the Assembly, Yaël Braun-Pivet.
The decision was confirmed by a vote in the hemicycle, during which the deputies in favor of the sanction, the harshest provided for by the regulations, stood up.
The President asked Grégoire de Fournas, the elected representative of Gironde, to leave the chamber before speaking. “Free democratic debate cannot allow everything […] and less racism,” said Yaël Braun-Pivet.
According to the minutes of question time with the Government on Thursday, Grégoire de Fournas said “to return to Africa” during the intervention of the deputy of La Francia Insumisa (LFI) for Val-d’Oise, Carlos Martens Bilongo, who questioned the Government about migrant rescue operations in the Mediterranean.
Warning with temporary disqualification
After listening to Grégoire de Fournas, the Bureau of the Assembly decided to pronounce against him a “warning with temporary disqualification”, which provides for a reduction of half of his parliamentary allowance for two months and the prohibition to participate in parliamentary work or to appear at the Bourbon Palace for a fortnight.
It is only the second time that a sanction of this type has been pronounced since 1958. According to two participants in the Assembly table meeting, the decision was taken unanimously, since the deputies of the National Association present chose to leave the room and not participate in the vote.
The sanction corresponds to “what we asked for,” said Mathilde Panot, president of the parliamentary group of La Francia Insumisa. For her part, Marine Le Pen, president of the far-right group, denounced a “political” procedure. “If every time a comment lacks delicacy, it should be excluded from the National Assembly, we would feel comfortable, we would have space,” she told reporters.
Demonstration before the Assembly
The National Group bench assured that the offending deputy was referring to the migrant boat mentioned by the member of the ‘unsubmissive’ and that he was not addressing the latter, to which Grégoire de Fournas sent a message, consulted by the Reuters news agency , in which he said “sorry for the lack of understanding” caused by his comments.
Several members of the government and non-RN deputies of the National Assembly protested strongly after the incident, while the Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, spoke of “ordinary racism”.
In the early afternoon, before the meeting of the Assembly table, a protest demonstration called by La Francia Insumisa gathered a few hundred people around the Bourbon Palace, including the deputy Carlos Martens Bilongo and the leader of the ‘unsubmissive’ Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
Mélenchon called for “the most severe punishment for the person who made the racist comments that we have heard.” And he added: “These comments are incompatible with the identity of our common homeland and the place where this sentence was pronounced.”
“Get out!” he yelled to applause. The rally ended with a sung Marseillaise.
*With Reuters; adapted from its original French version
