Emmanuel Macron hoped Thursday, during Emmanuel Macron's press conference at the European Council, that "everyone can express their voice" in the European campaign while the tenors of La France Insoumise Jean-Luc Mélenchon and the far right Éric Zemmour was banned from public meetings in Lille and Brussels.
“I am for respecting the laws of the Republic. Afterwards, for my part, I am always in favor of people being able to express themselves freely, even if I fight their ideas,” declared the president during a press conference after a European summit.
“A banana republic abuse of power”
The conference, scheduled for this Thursday evening, around LFI Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Rima Hassan, in a Lille room was prohibited by a prefectural decree, indicated La France insoumise and the Nord prefecture. This conference was initially to be held at the University of Lille, but was ultimately banned because “the conditions were no longer met to guarantee the serenity of the debates”. She was then relocated to a room on rue d'Arras.
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An attack on freedom of expression?
Éric Zemmour was also banned from a meeting in Brussels. The controversial meeting of the European nationalist right in Brussels, banned on Tuesday by local authorities, was finally able to take place on Wednesday after the decision of the Belgian Council of State to invalidate the decree.
The ban on the conference, which brings together several leading figures from the nationalist and Eurosceptic camp a few weeks before the European elections, was denounced by several European heads of government as an attack on freedom of expression and assembly. The organizers of the “National Conservatism Conference” (“NatCon”) had filed an appeal.