Gr\u00e9goire de Fournas, parliamentary representative from the National Rally (RN) party, interrupted Carlos Martens Bilongo, a representative from the far-left party France Unbowed (LFI) during a session of the National Assembly, the lower house of parliament.<\/p>\n
Bilongo was calling on the French government to cooperate with EU counties \u2013 notably Italy and its newly-elected far-right Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni \u2013 to assist several hundred African migrants rescued from the Mediterranean sea.<\/p>\n
De Fournas interrupted, shouting \u201cgo back to Africa.\u201d<\/p>\n
Chaos immediately ensued in the chamber, leading Ya\u00ebl Braun-Pivet, President of the National Assembly, to temporarily suspend the session.<\/p>\n
Bilongo and his party have described the shout as a racist personal attack, though de Fournas\u2019 party has argued that the interjection was actually intended for the migrants under discussion.<\/p>\n
\u201cToday, some people once again put my skin color at the center of a debate. I\u2019m born in France and I am a French lawmaker and I didn\u2019t think that today I will be insulted [like this] at the National Assembly,\u201d Bilongo told reporters after the incident.<\/p>\n
Mathilde Panot, leader of the far-left France Unbowed group at the National Assembly, has demanded that de Fournas face the toughest punishment for a French lawmaker \u2014 expulsion. \u201cRacists like him have no place in our parliament,\u201d Panot tweeted.<\/p>\n
De Fournas said that he was referring to migrants, tweeting that the France Unbowed had \u201chijacked\u201d his words in a \u201cdisgraceful manipulation.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cMy answer concerned the boat and the migrants, obviously not my colleague,\u201d he tweeted.<\/p>\n
According to French phonetic rules, there is little audible difference between the sentences, \u201cHe should go back to Africa\u201d and \u201cThey should go back to Africa\u201d as de Fournas expressed them.<\/p>\n
Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right RN\u2019s party group at the French lower house, voiced support for de Fournas in a tweet.<\/p>\n
\u201cGr\u00e9goire de Fournas obviously spoke about the migrants transported in boats by the NGOs that our colleague mentioned in his question to the government. The polemic created by our political opponents is crude and will not deceive the French,\u201d she wrote.<\/p>\n
Prime Minister \u00c9lisabeth Borne told journalists after the session that \u201cracism has no place in our democracy.\u201d<\/p>\n
The parliament will hold a meeting Friday to decide on a punishment for de Fournas. Expulsion, the toughest punishment given to a lawmaker from the parliament, was only handed down once during the French Fifth Republic, to a communist lawmaker Maxime Gremetz for disrupting a parliamentary session in 2011, according to CNN affiliate BFMTV.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A rightwing French lawmaker has caused uproar by shouting \u201cGo back to Africa\u201d during a Black lawmaker\u2019s comments at a parliamentary session broadcast to the public on Thursday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12963,"featured_media":21387,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,15],"tags":[7,26,25],"class_list":{"0":"post-21390","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-news","8":"category-politics","9":"tag-apie-project","10":"tag-news","11":"tag-politics"},"yoast_head":"\n