Belgian Union Leader Under Fire for Racist Social Media Posts

This complaint by the deputy follows two Facebook posts by the trade union representative of the emergency zones on his private profile. "Curious to hear the reaction of the BONOBOS parliamentarians!! Ah no, never in that sense, it doesn’t attract any votes!!" he had written on May 21. A few hours later, Éric Labourdette wrote the same message without mentioning the word "parliamentarians" this time.

"I didn’t want to give publicity to these remarks, but the SLFP did nothing after the report. I filed a more formal complaint there as well as a report to Unia," explains Hicham Talhi. "People who have responsibilities like Mr. Labourdette cannot make this kind of remarks," insists the Ecolo deputy. "It’s already the third incident committed by SLFP members in a short time," he adds, thus referring to the comment of a firefighter who proposed to send a panzer division to the neighborhoods of Brussels.

"I never made racist remarks!" declares Éric Labourdette to La Meuse. "I maintain ’bonobos’; it’s a race of chimpanzee. What does that have to do with racism? Bonobo parliamentarians? Yes, and so what? It’s not an insult," defends the president of the SLFP emergency zone section. "All this deputy has been doing for weeks is denouncing unfounded racist remarks; he is tarnishing the profession to get attention." Speaking about the message about the "panzer division", he suggests that five regiments of this type still exist in Germany.