Guidel (France) (AFP)
Without naming him, François Bayrou (MoDem) blasted Sunday "the obsession with the identity and the first names" of the polemicist Eric Zemmour, comparing it to that of the dictator Mobutu in Zaire in the 70s.
At the end of his party's re-entry university, in Guidel (Morbihan), François Bayrou implicitly returned to Eric Zemmour's wish to impose "French first names" on children born in France.
"Someone did that in the 20th century, Marshal Mobutu," with a "law to ban first names that were not African first names," said the president of the centrist party.
"Himself, his first name was Joseph before calling himself Mobutu Sese Seko. He made a big statement to say: it is not possible for an African to have a Jewish first name. (...) I do not want Mobutu's law to become, in one way or another, a law or a proposal for France, "he continued.
"Do you know the number of (French) soldiers who bear first names as diverse as their origins are? (...) We are going to say that they are not French? In what world do they want us to live", a chained Mr. Bayrou, close ally of Emmanuel Macron.
"Radicalities, we know how it ends. Mobutu, once he had done that, one day he hanged 500 people whose religious convictions did not please him", concluded the mayor of Pau and high commissioner to the plan.
The polemicist Eric Zemmour, in full promotion of a book, maintains the vagueness about his candidacy for the presidential election and multiplies the media interventions, with shock statements against immigration.
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