EDIT from 5 p.m.: The office of the National Assembly, proposed Friday the exclusion for 15 days of deputy RN Grégoire de Fournas. The Assembly validated this proposal by a seated-standing vote in stride.
“Let them return to Africa!” With this sentence launched while the black deputy Carlos Martens Bilongo (LFI) asked a question relating to the actions of SOS Méditerranée to rescue people shipwrecked at sea, the deputy Grégoire de Fournas (RN) caused a break in the session at the National Assembly on Wednesday.
This 37-year-old Girondin winegrower, elected last June alongside Girondin MP Edwige Diaz, cries out for political manipulation and explains in an apology email sent to Carlos Martens Bilongo that he was talking about “the boat and the migrants” and not about his fellow deputy. While Edwige Diaz appears to be the good student of the company of “de-demonization” of the RN engaged by Marine Le Pen, the behavior of Grégoire de Fournas recalls him, the outings of Jean-Marie Le Pen.
Close to the “Lepenist” current
Fervent defender of hunting, Grégoire de Fournas owns with his father the Château de Cassan, in Saint-Germain d’Esteuil in the Médoc. He joined the National Front in 2011. Although he was elected deputy at the same time as Edwige Diaz, rising star of the RN, they are not very close, on a human level, and do not share exactly the same conception of political action. Jean Petaux, a political scientist from Bordeaux, takes as proof of this the “late reaction of Edwige Diaz who did not rush to give him his support”.
Bruno Paluteau, RN regional councilor in New Aquitaine, takes up the elements of language used by the boss of his party to come to the aid of the deputy but is not very comfortable. “There are so many in this National Assembly, sometimes, verbal scuffles and when the democratic debate heats up, we can only regret misunderstandings, in emotion and passion. They don’t give us gifts.” If for Marine Le Pen, the invective referred to “migrants transported by boat”, Bruno Paluteau believes that it meant boats and not people. “These NGOs, often mafia-like, exploit human tragedies,” he comments.
The words of Grégoire de Fournas embarrass the new version of the extreme right party, more civilized, defended by Marine Le Pen. “It is representative of what is still a very important substrate of the RN, which I would call the branch of the National Front (FN) historical channel trend that is to say, Lepenist, believes Jean Petaux. Jean-Marie Le Pen assumed, in various ways, a form of excess and deliberately politically incorrect language, which made it an ideological and political variant. »
With this interpellation addressed to the LFI deputy, some elected officials like Thierry Trijoulet, first federal secretary of the PS in Gironde, think that the masks are falling. “Far from the muffled speeches and the constraint to measure their words to look good, the elected representatives of the National Rally, through Grégoire de Fournas, thus show their true face, that of primary racism, discrimination, exclusion, violence and hatred. »
A “dividing personality”
Grégoire de Fournas was elected departmental councilor in 2015 with his partner Sonia Colemyn. The latter would have asked the president of the Department to be able to sit at the other end of the hemicycle to save himself a certain psychological influence. It is an understatement to say that even within his party, he does not seem to be unanimous. “He has a divisive form of personality and he is not in the era of an RN where the R would not only be a rally but also a renewal”, comments political scientist Jean Petaux. Bruno Paluteau, however, highlights that Grégoire de Fournas took the initiative to prevent the deputy Carlos Martens Bilongo from thinking that it was a personal attack: “He regretted it and apologized”, he points out.
In a press release, Jean-Luc Gleyze, president (PS) of the department of Gironde reacted this Friday to the incident which occurred at the National Assembly: “These racist remarks recall this session of October 17, 2016 during which ALL the elected members of the Departmental Council, standing up and all tendencies combined, had voted for the successful reception of 36 migrants at the Domaine d’Hostens, following the dismantling of the makeshift camps in Calais. All the elected officials except… the same individual, who had made similar, odious, racist, xenophobic remarks, unworthy of a republican representation, provoking the anger and the emotion of our colleagues from Spanish, Portuguese or Italian immigration. »
A petition has been launched, by ex-LREM, for Grégoire de Fournas to resign from his post as deputy.