That’s it, the 1st round campaign is over. Emmanuel Macron on Friday denounced Marine le Pen’s proposal to ban the veil in the street, a measure which for him “would divide the country”, but on the other hand wished that women “drop the veil on their own”.
“We had forgotten what she (Mme le Pen) really was. It is for dividing the country and leaving millions of women and men saying: you have nothing to do with us, ”he said on the online media Brut, two days before the first round of the presidential one. “That’s not France.” “The State” does not fight “religion, that is why” there is no prohibition of a religion and its signs in the public space”.
Against the “Constitution”
If the far-right candidate Marine Le Pen bans the veil, by our Constitution, she is going to have to ban the yarmulke, she is going to have to ban the cross, she is going to have to ban the other religious signs,” he cried. “What Madame Le Pen defends is not our history, it is not the Republic, it is not even our Constitution”.
He also felt that mothers who accompany school outings should be allowed to wear the veil, “because otherwise they will take their child out of public school”.
“But I would like these women to decide for a moment to drop the veil,” he added, citing the case of post-baccalaureate students from Clichy-sous-Bois, where his wife created a school for young adults without training.
Stigma
“These young women have been to these courses (…) and said to themselves: my freedom is to fall,” he said. “I’m not against the veil, but when they make this choice, that’s the Republic,” he said. “Maybe they put it back” but “something happened, an opening of conscience”, he estimated, adding that “when we stigmatize people, they claim it”.
Contrary to the speech of the far-right candidate Eric Zemmour, he spoke out in favor of “the integration rather than the assimilation” of immigrants. “French law speaks of assimilation, which says that you come from another country, you want to become French and therefore you are assimilated, completely digested. I prefer the concept of integration,” he said.
“Which means that when you return to France, you marry its language, its culture, its history, its values”. But “we come with its history and I think that our Republic and our country must respect this history and consider that it is also a richness”.
Source: 20minutes
