French court fines father of extremist politician Le Pen for remarks against Roma
A court in France has upheld an earlier guilty verdict against the father of the country’s far-right presidential candidate for his racist remarks against the Roma minority in 2013.
An appeals court in the southern city of Aix-en-Provence reaffirmed on Monday the sentence against the 88-year-old founder of the ultra-right National Front (FN) party, Jean-Marie Le Pen, finding him guilty of inciting hatred against the Roma community by describing them as “irritating" and “smelly” at a press conference in Nice in 2013.
The court ordered him to pay a fine of 5,000 euros.
He was the runner-up in the country’s 2002 presidential election. In recent years, however, Le Pen has had a high-profile falling out with his daughter, Marine, after she took over the leadership of the FN and sought to purge the party of its more radical elements. Even so, her party line remains one of the most extremist ones in Europe.
Currently, Marine Le Pen is predicted to do well in the first round of France’s presidential election on April 23. She is, however, expected to lose the May 7 runoff to either centrist Emmanuel Macron or conservative Francois Fillon.
The elder Le Pen’s Monday conviction was his ninth for similar offenses. He has been defiant in the face of court verdicts in the past, refusing to apologize.
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Sonny Phung, of the anti-racism group SOS Racisme, which will receive 2,000 euros of Le Pen’s fine, decried the rhetoric used by the rightist politician, saying, “Jean-Marie Le Pen’s words were extremely serious and an open call to hate and ethnic discrimination.”
The minority Roma residents of France mostly hail from Bulgaria and Romania, and are often stigmatized in the country and accused of being responsible for an increase in petty crimes.
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