Signs full of “amalgams” brandished without restraint. The socialist president of the Burgundy-Franche-Comté regional council announced Thursday her intention to file a complaint for “incitement to hatred” against elected representatives of the National Rally who raised anti-immigration signs in plenary session. In the morning, the session was briefly interrupted when RN advisors held posters at arm's length with the message "Foreign rapists out" in support of activists from a "feminist identity" collective in Besançon.
“We have to stop with these nauseating amalgams. The posters that were brandished and the repeated comments associating immigrants and rape are intolerable anywhere and even more so in a Republican enclosure,” President Marie-Guite Dufay solemnly declared. “I therefore decided to contact the public prosecutor (…) I also intend to file a complaint for incitement to hatred”, underlined the elected official before the lunch break.
Two activists from the Némésis collective brandished the same message during the Besançon carnival on Sunday, which led to a complaint from the city's environmentalist mayor, Anne Vignot. One of them, aged 19, was placed in police custody on Tuesday for a few hours, as part of a preliminary investigation for “provoking hatred or violence against a group of people because of their origin or a so-called race.
“A stinking ideology”
During the regional council session, the president of the RN group Julien Odoul, also a deputy and spokesperson for the party, expressed his support for these women in the name, according to him, of “freedom of expression”. It was at this moment that the RN councilors brandished their signs, according to the video transmission of the assembly.
Later, Marie-Guite Dufay denounced in a press release the use by one of these elected officials of an “expression borrowed from Nazi vocabulary”, the word “Untermensch”, “subhuman” in German, within the hemicycle. In a press release in the evening, elected RN Thomas Lutz admitted to having uttered this word, regretting an “inadequate, inappropriate and very unfortunate” use in order to “qualify the status of elected representatives of the opposition”. “It is very obvious that at no time did I want to draw a parallel with the martyrdom of the Jewish people,” he added.
The National Union of Journalists (SNJ) also criticized the Némésis collective for having copied on the Est Républicain website a photo and a video of their action taken by two journalists from the daily and for having “published them on its media digital”, without crediting them and “without the slightest authorization”. “This is a clear violation of copyright, with the aim of serving a stinking ideology,” the union lambasted. L’Est Républicain indicated that “procedures have been initiated” in this regard.