Far-Right Official Confronts Veiled Mother at French Regional Council Meeting

It is a humiliation that was experienced by a veiled woman. The young woman who was accompanying her son, a fifth-grade student, to the primary school in Belfort, like any good mother, to discover the Regional Council of Bourgogne-Franche-Comté, in Dijon, was far from imagining what was waiting for her.

While she was sitting quietly, Julien Odoul, President of the "Rassemblement national" (RN) Group and Spokesperson for his party, asked the President of the Socialist Party of the region, Marie-Guite Dufay, "in the name of [our] secular principles", to order the young woman "to kindly remove her Islamic veil", reports Le Monde.

That’s when everything got complicated. The other elected officials reacted. In the aftermath, one, from the far right, crossed paths with the veiled woman and told her: "You are submissive, you will see, when the Russians arrive, you will have to leave!". "It was very aggressive," said Jacqueline Ferrari, an elected member of the Union of Democrats and Ecologists, who witnessed the scene.

Faced with this situation, Marie-Guite Dufay issued a press release to announce that she would bring this matter before the competent courts. She also alerted Jean-François Chanet, Regional Rector of the Bourgogne-Franche-Comté Academy.