A right-wing French lawmaker caused an uproar when he shouted “Go back to Africa” during a black lawmaker’s remarks at a parliamentary session that were broadcast to the public on Thursday.
Grégoire de Furnas, a National Rally MP, interrupted Carlos Martins Bilongo, a representative of the far-left party France Unboyed (LFI) during a session of the National Assembly, the lower house of parliament.
Bilongo called on the French government to cooperate with EU countries – notably Italy and newly elected far-right prime minister Giorgia Meloni – to help several hundred African migrants rescued from the Mediterranean.
De Fornas interrupted him, shouting “Go back to Africa.”
Chaos immediately ensued in the chamber, leading Yale Brown Buffet, Speaker of the National Assembly, to temporarily suspend the session.
Bilongo and his party described the shouting as a personal racist attack, although de Fornas’ party argued that the intervention was in fact intended for the immigrants under discussion.
“Today, some people are putting the color of my skin again at the center of the debate. I was born in France as a French lawmaker and didn’t think I would be offended today. [like this] in the National Assembly,” Bilongo told reporters after the accident.
Mathilde Baneau, leader of the far-left France Unboyed group in the National Assembly, demanded that de Fournas face the harshest punishment for the expulsion of a French lawmaker. “There is no place for racists like him in our parliament,” Bannot wrote on Twitter.
De Fournas said he was referring to immigrants, tweeting that unrestrained France had “hijacked” his words in a “disgraceful manipulation”.
“My answer was about the boat and the migrants, obviously not my mate,” he wrote on Twitter.
According to French phonetic rules, there is no audible difference between the sentences, “They must go back to Africa” and “They must go back to Africa” as expressed by de Furnas.
Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right RN party in the French Chamber of Deputies, expressed her support for De Fournas in a tweet on Twitter.
It is clear that Grégoire de Furnas spoke of the migrants taken in boats by the NGOs that our colleague mentioned in his question to the government. I wrote that the controversy created by our political opponents is crude and will not deceive the French.
“Racism has no place in our democracy,” Prime Minister Elizabeth Bourne told reporters after the session.
Parliament will meet on Friday to decide whether to sanction de Fornas. And according to CNN affiliate BFMTV, expulsion, the most severe punishment for a member of Parliament, has been issued only once during the French Fifth Republic, to Communist MP Maxime Grimitz for disrupting a parliamentary session in 2011.
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