The far-right leader compared Muslim street prayers to the Nazi occupation of France.
Marine Le Pen, head of France’s far-right National Front party, will face trial in October on a charge of inciting racial hatred for having compared Muslim street prayers to the occupation of France by Nazi troops during World War II, Agence France-Presse reported Tuesday.
The charge, which relates to comments that Le Pen made to a group of party activists in eastern France 2010, creates an unfortunate distraction for the far-right leader as she seeks election in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region in December.
“It’s an occupation of swathes of our territory, of neighborhoods in which religious law is applied,” she said at the time. “Indeed there are no tanks, no soldiers, but there is an occupation just the same, and it weighs on the inhabitants.”
The remarks prompted two anti-discrimination groups to file lawsuits against Le Pen and a court in Lyon, where the remarks were made, opened a preliminary investigation against her.
In 2013, the European Parliament, of which Le Pen is a member, lifted her immunity, allowing the Lyon court to launch a formal investigation, which led to Tuesday’s decision that she would have to face trial.
“It is scandalous that a politician should be sued for expressing their opinions,” Le Pen told Le Monde newspaper, reacting to the ruling. “I will go before the court in order to say so.”
Marine Le Pen, who faces her first trial on hate speech charges, has worked to rid her party of a reputation for racism, xenophobia and anti-Semitism ever since she took over its leadership from her father, Jean-Marie in 2011.
The anti-EU, anti-immigration party voted last month to exclude the elder Le Pen from the National Front for having said that he still believed the Nazi death camps were a mere detail of World War II. A similar comment he made in 1987 resulted in several convictions against him on various hate speech charges.
Marine Le Pen is due to face trial in Lyon in October, in the midst of what will be a highly publicized election campaign for a seat in the depressed Nord-Pas-de-Calais region. Le Pen is leading opinion polls over her main conservative rival in the region, Xavier Bertrand, who was formerly Labor Minister under President Nicolas Sarkozy.
Politico.eu