The plenary session of the Burgundy-Franche-Comté regional council, this Thursday, April 11, 2024, was largely disrupted by elected officials from the National Rally (RN). After brandishing xenophobic signs targeting immigrants, one of the regional councilors of the far-right party even used an expression borrowed from Nazi vocabulary.
The socialist president, Marie-Guite Dufay, after having suspended the session following the action of the RN elected officials, then after the use of the expression, announced her intention to file a complaint for “incitement to hatred”.
Here is what we know about this session disrupted by the National Rally at the Burgundy Franche-Comté regional council.
Signs in support of the Némésis identity collective
This Thursday, April 11, the plenary assembly of the Burgundy-Franche-Comté regional council was held in Besançon. In the morning, after an intervention by their leader, MP Julien Odoul, the elected representatives of the National Rally each held up a sign, on which a similar message was written: “Foreign rapists out.”
An action in support of the activists of the Némésis collective, claiming to be “feminist and identity-based”, who had held up similar signs during the Besançon carnival on April 7, recalls the regional daily The Republican East. The city’s environmentalist mayor, Anne Vignot, had filed a complaint for inciting racial hatred.
As Franceinfo points out, the Besançon prosecutor had opened a preliminary investigation to “provocation of hatred or violence against a group of people because of their origin or an alleged race”. One of the activists, aged 19, was placed in police custody for a few hours on Monday April 8.
The president denounces “nauseating amalgamations”: first interruption of session
In response to the action of the National Rally, the president of the regional council, Marie-Guite Dufay, suspended the session. “ We must stop with these nauseating amalgams. The posters that were held up and the repeated comments associating immigrants and rape are intolerable anywhere and even more so in a Republican enclosure,” she said solemnly.
“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.
On social networks, the Némésis collective reacted by thanking the elected representatives of the RN. Deputy Julien Odoul justifying the action on his Facebook page and on the social network X: “ Because the left and the extreme left of Burgundy Franche-Comté finance illegal immigration, because the mayor of Besançon wants to censor the words of women who refuse the intolerable, the elected officials of the RN remind us that a foreign rapist must be forced out ! »
An elected RN uses a word borrowed “from Nazi ideology”
Later, the president of the region suspended the session again after the intervention of the elected representative of the far-right party Thomas Lutz, pronouncing the German word “Untermensch”, an expression that Marie-Guite Dufay denounced, more late in the day, in a press release, like a borrowed word “to Nazi ideology” and meaning “subhuman”.
In the press release, the president of the region announces her intention to file a complaint with the public prosecutor following the events that occurred during the plenary assembly. “We must never let the provocations and excesses of the National Rally pass without reacting. Borrowing from Nazi vocabulary is extremely serious, and gives a clear overview of those who today make up a party nevertheless in search of respectability”, declared Marie-Guite Dufay.
The elected RN Thomas Lutz recognizes a “very unfortunate” use of the word
The elected RN Thomas Lutz responded, in response, with his own press release, acknowledging having uttered this word, and regretting its use “inadequate, inappropriate and very unfortunate” 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.
On the social network from the Brittany region, Loïg Chesnais-Girard.
“From insults and arms of honor in the hemicycle in Brittany to Nazi vocabulary in Burgundy Franche-Comté, the RN shows its face, he writes. Behind the smiles and the elaborate images there is reality: nationalism, individualism and a nasty penchant for violence. »