France‘s main far-right party has expelled a member who is a policeman after body cam footage of him making racist comments sparked outrage ahead of presidential elections it hopes to win next year.
Marine Le Pen, of the National Rally (RN), is eyeing her best chance at the top job after years of seeking to make the anti-immigration party she inherited from her father more palatable to the general public.
In the footage dated November last year and published in local daily Midi Libre on Tuesday, the body cam of a policeman in the southern town of Carcassonne captures conversations with colleagues while on duty in which they make racist, homophobic and sexist remarks.
The officer who speaks the most, whom Midi Libre identified as part of the security detail of the RN, repeatedly uses derogatory terms for people perceived as of North African or African descent.
The report caused indignation, with President Emmanuel Macron‘s equality minister Aurore Bergé condemning them as “absolutely unacceptable”.
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The RN on Wednesday denounced the remarks “in the strongest possible terms”, describing them as “criminally punishable” and “at odds with the values” of the party.
It said it had “immediately removed him from the ranks of the security team and expelled him from the National Rally”.
The Carcassonne prosecutor’s office said it had launched an investigation, without providing more details.
Former prime minister Gabriel Attal who has announced his bid for the presidency next year shared the video footage on X and wrote: “This is what a France led by the RN would look like. Unrestrained and encouraged hatred.”
Le Pen is running for president for a fourth time despite an appeals court in July upholding a graft conviction, a verdict she is seeking to overturn with the country’s highest court.
Polls show her leading in the first round of the presidential vote next spring and as posing at least a major threat to any rival in the second.
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Rights group Amnesty International warned in April of “worrying” public racist comments and challenges to the rule of law.
A far-right hate campaign has targeted Bally Bagayoko, the new Black mayor of Paris’s largest suburb, while the hard-left France Unbowed party this year reported several of its Black lawmakers, including a deputy speaker, had received a racist letter.
(FRANCE 24 with AFP)
