Paris (AFP)
In front of an audience represented by a mosaic of faces in the background, Jean-Luc Mélenchon denounced Friday evening the "sanitary tramping" of France during a "digital meeting" where the rebels presented their solutions to the coronavirus crisis .
MEP Mathilde Panot and MEP Manuel Bompard were alongside the leader of LFI, speaking at the start of the meeting. Videos of deputies Adrien Quatennens and Caroline Fiat - who resumed her job as a nursing assistant - were also broadcast.
To represent the audience, a mosaic of activists' faces filmed by webcam was installed in the background. LFI has claimed 20,000 spectators across all platforms.
The rebellious proceeded with their proposals, also announcing that the program "L'Avenir en commun", which Jean-Luc Mélenchon had carried in the presidential election of 2017, was put back in the works.
After denouncing the "sanitary tramping" of France because, in his eyes, of economic liberalism, and reiterating his wish for a "planning" of the response to the crisis, Mr. Mélenchon asked to "tear down the wall of public debt.
"The debt is an illusion, because it is calculated for the state as it is for a business, while the nation will never disappear," professed the group's president in the National Assembly.
"Let us transform the 18% of French debt that the European Central Bank has in its coffers into perpetual debt without interest", a "peaceful and reasoned solution", he proposed.
So far, said Manuel Bompard, the European Union, with its "obsession to refuse protectionism", "has not been up to the task" and has not put in place "any coordination policy ".
On the French government side, "everything was refused to us", deplored Mathilde Panot: "moratorium on rents, a special check for families in fuel poverty, the restoration of the ISF".
© 2020 AFP