It will have been without great surprise the occasion of one of the most lively exchanges between Marine Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron during their televised debate, Wednesday April 20. For nearly a fortnight, the two candidates in the second round of the presidential election had been engaged in skirmishes from a distance over the ban on the wearing of the Islamic veil on public roads and in places open to the public, which the National Rally candidate. In front of viewers, the outgoing president accused her of driving “to civil war” with a project that would not have ” any sense “would “infeasible” and betray “the France of universalism” as well as its Constitution.
The direct question of the journalists arbiters of the debate – “Will you change the rules governing the wearing of religious symbols in public space? – forced Mme Le Pen to get out of the vagueness that she had projected in recent days on her initial proposal to ban outright the wearing of the headscarf to Muslim women who cover their heads with them, under penalty of being fined. This was not done without the beginning of a slip: “I am against the ban… I am for the ban on the veil in public spaces, said the far-right candidate. I said it in the clearest way. »
Saturday April 16, Marine Le Pen had seemed to let go of the ballast by returning this “complex problem” to a parliamentary discussion and a hypothetical referendum. On Wednesday, she cut short this beginning of a decline. She again affirmed that she was not attacking a religious symbol in this way, but an ideological symbol, Islamism, which, according to her, wants “enforcing sharia” to a Republic that she wants “proud of herself, not ashamed”.
For Macron, Le Pen “confuses all the problems”
Mr. Macron strongly attacked her, accusing her of “to confuse all the problems” sliding from one religion to Islamism, then to foreigners. Finally, he reproached him, by this announced prohibition, for “pushing millions of our compatriots, by their religion, out of the public space”. “On the contrary, it is defending the Republic, defending equality between men and women, defending the city to oppose these Islamists through a law that targets them and only targets them »retorted M.me The pen.
The two candidates have in passing slashed on the law adopted in the summer by Parliament to fight against “separatism”in the first place against Islamist excesses. “She was useless”accused M.me Le Pen, who pleaded for “close the 570 radical mosques” and not “to be satisfied with a charter of secularism”, that this law requires associations that receive public subsidies to sign. Mr. Macron, on the contrary, defended it by asserting that the 99 mosques “suspected of separatism” have been placed ” under surveillance “on which “23 have been closed and 36 have changed and are under control”.
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