She had just been elected first federal secretary of the Socialist Party in the Rhône. The first secretary of the party, Olivier Faure, announced this Saturday to dismiss Christiane Constant. She was at the origin of a message “containing a racist remark” which leaked to the press, the party said.
“Following her election as first federal secretary of the Rhône of the Socialist Party on Thursday evening, Christiane Constant wrote a message containing a racist remark”, indicates the PS in a press release. “The anti-racist fight is at the foundation of the identity of the Socialist Party, which condemns with the greatest firmness these unacceptable and criminally reprehensible remarks”, specifies the party.
The party leadership “immediately asked Christiane Constant to resign. Not having received a letter of resignation from him at this time, First Secretary Olivier Faure dismisses Christiane Constant from her functions “and” suspends her from the Socialist Party “, adds the PS.
She incurs exclusion
Olivier Faure “will propose to the National Office, once installed by the National Council on Saturday March 11, to seize the National Conflicts Commission to launch an internal sanction procedure which can go as far as exclusion”, is it added.
According to the daily Le Progrès and Lyon Mag, Christiane Constant, after her election as the first federal of the Rhône, had written, in a message sent from her phone, “We have eliminated all these macaques”, accompanied by emojis representing monkeys. With the daily, the socialist’s entourage assured that it was a typo.
“These insulting and racist remarks are intolerable. I address my deep regrets and my full solidarity to the comrades of the Socialist Party targeted in this message ”, reacted Cédric Van Styvendael, mayor of Villeurbanne. The department is also that of the opponent of the first secretary, Hélène Geoffroy, mayor of Vaulx-en-Velin, originally from Guadeloupe and opposed to the electoral agreement concluded between the PS and the other left-wing forces including La France insoumise.
The PS remains shaken by internal conflicts and disagreements a month after its congress in Marseilles, which resulted, after several weeks of invectives and accusations of fraud, in a compromise with the reappointment as first secretary of Olivier Faure, at the within a collective governance in which his main opponent, Nicolas Mayer-Rossignol, became first deputy secretary.