PARIS: French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal on Thursday (Jun 27) accused his main challenger for the top job, Jordan Bardella, of tolerating racist speech in the ranks of his far-right camp amid a heated last television debate before the start of parliamentary elections.
The debate between Attal, National Rally (RN) party chief Bardella and socialist leader Olivier Faure was the last direct confrontation of three radically opposed views on France’s future before ballots open for the first voting round on Sunday.
“You can’t build peace and unity when you present … more than a hundred candidates who have been accused of making racist remarks”, Attal told Bardella, reading out press reports of the politicians using racial slurs.
“Each and every one of us must always be uncompromising with hate speech, because if we are not uncompromising, we end up legitimising it,” he said.
Bardella, whose party is leading in opinion polls and could emerge as the dominant political power in the country for the first time, rebuffed the accusations, shouting “This is false!” at his adversary.
“I don’t like this way of associating a pseudo-climate of hatred with the National Rally electorate”, Bardella said later in the debate.
