The national leader of EELV, Julien Bayou. – GEOFFROY VAN DER HASSELT / AFP
Europe Ecology The Greens announced this Saturday their intention to file a defamation complaint against ministers Marlène Schiappa and Gérald Darmanin, who oppose the green city hall of Strasbourg on a possible grant for the construction of a mosque. “In agreement with the Executive Board and Jeanne Barseghian, mayor of Strasbourg, EELV will file a defamation complaint against Marlène Schiappa and Gérald Darmanin”, declared Julien Bayou, national secretary of EELV, in a speech to the Federal Council.
“We made the decision yesterday (Friday) evening and the complaint will be filed in the course of next week,” said the boss of the Greens. “Gérald Darmanin, the minister of school canteens, accused the EELV majority, led by Jeanne Barseghian, of ‘financing foreign interference on French soil’. Its deputy minister, for his part, affirmed that ‘EELV made a pact with radical Islam’. In question: the adoption on Monday of a subsidy for the construction of a mosque, ”recalled the national secretary.
Darmanin “lies”
For Julien Bayou, “we have a government and its Minister of the Interior and Cults who are lying: he never alerted the mayor of the danger that the association that carries the project would represent. For us it is very clear: if this association is dangerous, let him close it ”. “That ministers use and abuse the means of public power to smear their political opponents for purely electoral reasons and / or to create a diversion and try to look away from their failures and their shortcomings, we cannot accept” , emphasizes Julien Bayou.
“That ministers, rather than getting down to their task, prefer to play the ‘community manager’ or the gun-bearers of Macron, it is unacceptable! “, he added. A standoff between Gerald Darmanin and the green mayor of Strasbourg, since the vote Monday by the city council of the “principle of a subsidy” of 2.5 million euros intended for the site of the Eyyub Sultan mosque, carried by a Turkish association, the Islamic Confederation Millî Görüs (CIMG).
“We consider that this community (the town hall of Strasbourg) should not have financed a foreign interference on our soil”, said the Minister of the Interior on Wednesday. Marlène Schiappa, in charge of Citizenship, had estimated that environmentalists “flirt more and more dangerously with the theses of radical Islamism”.