2023-04-19 04:50:20
It is a video that clashes right in the protest against the pension reform. After his speech, in front of 15 million French people, Emmanuel Macron shared a few minutes with a group of singers, in the middle of Paris on Monday evening. The “singing tour” of the President of the Republic, a priori improvised, allowed a good publicity stunt for Canto, a karaoke-type application which allows you to find and sing mainly French traditional texts. Problem (and controversy): this application is close to the extreme right.
This video was filmed on Monday evening, as the Élysée confirmed to us. We see Emmanuel Macron, walking in the middle of the night on rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, in the 6th arrondissement of Paris, three kilometers from the Élysée Palace. He is then challenged by a small group offering him… to sing with them. “The president, accompanied by Brigitte Macron, coming out of his speech, came across us singing the Piedmontese and joined us”, testified to Current values Jean Etxeberri, one of the choristers.
This small group of young people is in fact from the choir of the Chœur Saint-Longin, according to a journalist from Current Values, whose members had met in a cafe a few meters away. The song they sing, with the president surrounded by his bodyguards, is a “historic” song from the Pyrenees, “Le Refuge” by Michel Etcheverry. The same song that the French president had already sung in July 2022 during a stage of the Tour de France in the Pyrenees.
The story could have ended there. But that was without counting the phones and lenses that were filming this moment. On the screen of the phone brandished to Emmanuel Macron so that he can read the lyrics, the open application, Canto, allows you to find the lyrics of traditional songs and sing them like karaoke. Project Canto, behind the initiative, relayed the video on his Facebook page from Monday evening: “Only the mafia and Project Canto can blackmail a head of state!” comments the association, publishing the video.
An application close to the far right
The video is however not without controversy, although there is no question of Canto in this video. This app was pinned late last year by Release. The newspaper noted the presence, among the songs on the platform, of popular Catholic fundamentalist songs, military songs sung under the Third Reich or even the song of a Spanish fascist movement. As Liberation also noted, its founder, Charles Dor, is a former member of the GUD, a far-right student organization.
Quoted by France Inter, the president’s entourage indicates that he “took a moment with his wife (after his speech). As they were walking late in the evening in Paris, they were stopped by a group of young people singing who asked the President if he could join them. He then joined them for a Pyrenean song that he likes and knows. » Emmanuel Macron « couldn’t know at that time the background of every person he was talking to.”
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