France border agreement under threat
EMMANUEL Macron, the French presidential favourite, says he will renegotiate France’s border agreement with Britain, raising the prospect of a “Jungle” migrants’ camp opening in Kent.
Mr Macron, who faces Marine Le Pen in the election run-off next month, said the Le Touquet treaty, under which British border guards operate in Calais, should be “back on the table”.
David Cameron warned last year that if British border controls were moved back from Calais after Brexit, refugees would camp on British soil.
Mr Macron said: “I want to put the Le Touquet border deal back on the table. It must be renegotiated, especially the parts that deal with the fate of isolated child migrants.” In an interview with the French television channel TF1, he added: “There is no easy solution to the migrant crisis. If there was one, it would have been found.”
The Le Touquet treaty, signed in 2003 by Tony Blair and Jacques Chirac, allowed each country to set up border controls in each other’s Channel ports. If the treaty were ripped up, migrants would have to be dealt with in the UK.
A Conservative spokesman said: “We have always been very clear that protecting and enhancing the shared border between the UK and France at Calais is in both the UK and France’s best interests. By contrast Jeremy Corbyn is not strong enough to keep our borders secure.”
EMMANUEL MACRON visited the scene of the Nazi’s worst war-time atrocity in occupied France yesterday, as presidential rival Marine Le Pen’s party became embroiled in a furore over alleged Holocaust denial.
Mr Macron, 39, the favourite to win the two-way run-off vote a week tomorrow, was shown around the village of Oradour-sur-Glane, in central France, where SS troops massacred 642 people in June 1944. He was hosted by the last remaining survivor among the six people who escaped.
“To not remember is to repeat the mistakes of history,” he said afterwards.
The visit took place as Ms Le Pen’s stand-in as National Front party leader, Jean-François Jalkh, was summarily replaced by Steeve Briois, a popular FN mayor from northern France, after Mr Jalkh was accused of praising the work of a convicted Holocaust denier.
In a French academic journal published in 2005, Mr Jalkh, an MEP, was quoted in an interview from 2000 praising “rigorous” research by Robert Faurisson. Mr Jalkh said he was not a Holocaust denier but had spoken to a chemistry expert about Zyklon B, the gas used in the extermination chambers, and is cited as saying: “I consider that from a technical standpoint it is impossible – and I stress, impossible – to use it in mass exterminations. Why? Because you need several days to decontaminate a space…where Zyklon B has been used.”
Mr Jalkh, who intends to file a legal complaint, is also among those called to trial in an alleged illegal financing scheme for the party – one of the other challenges facing the Le Pen campaign.
The latest row is a setback for Ms Le Pen, who has spent years trying to detoxify her party from its anti-Semitic past under her father Jean-Marie Le Pen.
Asked if she would accept any history revisionists into her government, she said: “I abhor these theories. I don’t accept that one can defend them.”
She herself provoked outrage during the first round of campaigning for denying that the French state was to blame for a notorious round-up of Jews in Nazi-occupied Paris.
Polls show Mr Macron would beat Ms Le Pen by 19 percentage points in the run-off but analysts warn of a high level of abstention by moderates.
And last night Ms Le Pen scored a small coup when she was backed by Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, who won 4.7 per cent of the first-round vote as head of Debout la France (Arise France).
Mr Dupont-Aignan is an admirer of Brexit and, like Ms Le Pen, wants to hold a referendum on whether France should remain in the EU.