Lui argues for an unfortunate choice of words, the opposition sees in it an adherence to far-right theses. The candidate of the presidential majority in the Somme, Pascal Rifflart, finds himself at the center of a controversy for having used the expression “Ethnic French”, attached to the vocabulary of the hardest right, in an election leaflet, reports The Parisian. In front of the outcry, the legislative candidate evokes “misunderstood words”, but says “assume”.
“Native French, I have a deep attachment to my country, its lands, its inhabitants and its democratic functioning,” the local elected official wrote in the original version of his profession of faith, shared on social networks. “A stump is what it means: a stump. It is necessary to put the terms in their context, I used them to talk about Europe ” is justified, on BFMTV, the chosen one of the Amiens metropolis.
Pascal Rifflart explains this lexical choice by a “concern for balance” with his substitute Farida Andasmas. The latter “wanted to put that she was daughter of French military harki and for the sake of balance, I put that I was ethnic French to show how France is multiple, ” says the candidate, who also says “totally assume what is written”.
Removal of the expression
Yet the phrase has been removed from the profession of faith that will be distributed to voters and does not appear in the new leaflet shared on Twitter. The chosen one now pleads “misunderstood words”. ” The inhabitants of the 1re riding of the Somme suffer. They have nothing to do with a semantic debate far from their daily concerns and which is a pretext for our opponents who do not talk about the real topics,” he tries to justify one last time.
With Farida, we wanted to express our diversity and complementarity.The words used are not understood.The expression “Ethnic French” will therefore not appear in the profession of faith that each of the voters of the 1st constituency of the 80 will receive #Renaissance pic.twitter.com/lBCsWrKs5F
— PASCAL RIFFLART (@p_rifflart) May 25, 2022
