They hope to discourage "any slippage" during his campaign in the Var.
According to our information, a complaint was filed against the legislative candidate Éric Zemmour by the association La maison des potes, for remarks deemed "racist" towards the Senegalese community, when he was still a columnist on CNews.
On March 25, 2022, on the Morandini Live program on CNews, Éric Zemmour notably stated that “most crack sellers are illegal Senegalese”.
Also on CNews, on May 13, 2021, the columnist reaffirmed: “All crack traffickers are Senegalese.
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Repeated remarks that provoked the indignation and emotion of the Senegalese community.
On March 27, Senegal had risen by way of embassy against words “of an undeniable primary racism, falling under an offensive stigmatization”, denoting an “obsessive relentlessness” against the Senegalese community.
These allegations fall under "incitement to racial hatred, public insult of a racist nature and defamation", considers La Maison des potes in the complaint addressed to the Dean of the examining magistrates that we were able to consult.
The director of publication of the CNews channel, Thiery de Bercegol du Moulin, responsible for the comments made in the channel's broadcasts, is also the subject of a complaint.
An investigating judge was seized.
“Messages of hate”
Already at the origin of several convictions against Éric Zemmour, in 2020 and 2021, the association, a civil party, highlights that such statements, if they are recognized as inciting racial hatred, can be liable to an additional penalty of ineligibility, while the presidential candidate is now running for the legislative elections, in the 4th district of Var.
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“We hope that the convictions of Mr. Zemmour leave the symbolic side and that they are dissuasive.
May the fear of being sentenced to a sentence of ineligibility push this candidate and the others to stop spreading messages that incite racist hatred, ”says Samuel Thomas, president of the Maison des Potes, to the Parisian.
Such sentences are rare but do exist: in 2017, Franck Sinisi, a former member of the National Front and municipal councilor in Isère, was given a two-month suspended prison sentence and four years of ineligibility for having offered to "finance the construction of housing home for Roma with "their golden teeth".
Also judged on appeal for "disputing a crime against humanity" for having argued, in October 2019 on the CNews channel, that Marshal Pétain had "saved" French Jews during the Second World War, Éric Zemmour saw this Thursday his acquittal be confirmed by the Paris Court of Appeal.
