Sport and charity work are among few subjects warring politicians unite around, but not so in the new French parliament where a dispute has erupted over whether far-right MPs can play in the assembly’s football team.
Left-wing parties and the governing Renaissance group of President Emmanuel Macron announced Tuesday they would boycott a charity game if the far-right National Rally (RN) joins the parliament side.
Even though the RN has historically high representation with 89 seats in the assembly, “that doesn’t mean that we should help them in their desire to normalize themselves,” government spokesman Olivier Veran told CNews television.
Senior Renaissance MP Aurore Berge fretted about the team photo, telling fellow centrist lawmakers: “We are not in the same team. Neither far-right, nor far-left.”
The row underlines a decades-long dilemma for mainstream French politicians over how to deal with the far-right parties of Jean-Marie Le Pen and his daughter Marine Le Pen since their emergence in the 1970s.
Some have tried to boycott them entirely, including former president Jacques Chirac, who refused to debate Jean-Marie in 2002 when they faced off in the final round of the presidential election.
But Marine has tempered her views on immigration and the European Union, moving her party closer to the mainstream right and becoming an anti-elite fixture on the political landscape.
She scored 41.4 percent in the second round of April’s presidential election and the party increased its number of seats 10-fold in June’s parliamentary vote.
“It says a lot about these people in reality,” Le Pen told RTL radio on Wednesday about the football row. “It’s hatred all the time, everywhere, non-stop fighting.”
Veran, an enthusiastic player in previous parliament charity matches, acknowledged his own misgivings about the boycott.
“In saying that I won’t go to play, I am taking part in a phenomenon that serves to reinforce the notion that they (the far-right) are ostracised, that they are victims of the system,” he said.