Front-runner lashes Le Pen racism in election run-off
Never forget, says Macron as hr pays homage to Moroccan killed by skinheads
FRENCH presidential frontrunner Emmanuel Macron yesterday paid homage to a young Moroccan man – who drowned in the Seine 22 years ago after being pushed into the river by skinheads – on the fringes of the National Front’s traditional May Day rally.
In an anniversary gesture aimed at painting the National Front (FN) as extremist a week before he faces its candidate Marine le Pen in a run-off vote for the presidency, Macron observed a minute’s silence on the riverbank.
“We must never forget what happened,” Macron said at the site, a few steps from the Louvre museum, where he laid a wreath of flowers at a plaque in memory of Brahim Bouarram.
Macron also relaunched his attack on comments from Le Pen, who last week said the French state was not responsible for a mass arrest of Jews in Paris during World War II.
“I will fight until the very last second not only against her idea of what constitutes democracy and the French Republic” said Macron.
In between the two rounds of the 1995 presidential election, Bouarram, 29, a father of two, was thrown into the Seine by skinheads leaving a May Day rally held nearby in Paris by Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie le Pen, who was party leader at the time.
Macron’s tribute, in the presence of Bouarram’s son Said, took place just as Jean-Marie le Pen, the father of Marine, addressed this year’s FN May Day rally near the statue of national heroine, Joan of Arc, a few hundred meters away.
In 1995, the skinheads leaving Le Pen senior’s parade pushed Bouarram, who could not swim, into the river and watched him struggle to stay afloat in the swift-flowing current, before they left the scene.
One was sentenced to an eight-year jail sentence in 1998 and three others to fiveyear terms.
The tribute to Bouarram was the latest attempt by Macron, a pro-Europe centrist, to remind voters of what he and other critics see as the National Front’s racist and anti-Semitic legacy.
He also visited a Holocaust memorial in Paris on Sunday and last week a village burnt down by the Nazis in World War II. The FN has cried foul at Macron’s tactics. The niece of Marine le Pen, Marion Marechal-Le Pen, said yesterday that Macron was using death and deportations for political ends and indulging in “World War II blackmail”.
Jean-Marie le Pen told his supporters: “Macron is doing a tour of graveyards. It’s a bad sign for him.”
Marine le Pen has sought to cleanse the National Front’s image of xenophobic and anti-semitic associations and make it more palatable to a broader electorate.
Her father, 88,a former paratrooper, was expelled from the party’s management but remains the party’s honorary president and has lent money to his daughter’s campaign.
“I have no contacts with him anymore, I’m not responsible for his misconduct” Marine le Pen said.
Jean-Marie le Pen has denied any connection with Bouarram’s death, calling it a move to discredit his movement.
He also called it a common criminal “incident” of the kind he said occurred daily in heavily populated cities. – AP