Macron’s outspoken comments to “Echorouk News” TV spark off uproar in France

Mr. Emmanuel Macron, considered by the opinion polls to be the frontrunner in the upcoming French presidential election, has come under attack from his political rivals in France after he bluntly termed France’s long-running colonization of Algeria as a “crime against humanity.”

Mr. Marcon, who founded the social liberal and progressive party En Marche! (meaning forward/on the move) in 2016, made the comments regarding the then French colonial yoke in Algeria during an interview in Algiers granted earlier this week to  Echourouk News TV on the sidelines of his visit to Algeria.

Mr. Macron said colonization was “genuinely barbaric, and constitutes a part of our past that we have to confront by apologizing,” while adding “France had installed human rights in Algeria but has simply forgotten to read them” .

Mr. Marcon also said he hopes to promote “reconciliation of memories” between the two countries while making a stopover at the Martyrs’ Memorial in upper Algiers during his two-day visit to Algeria. 

Following his enlightening comments, his rivals on the right, including the Republicans’ presidential candidate Francois Fillon and members of Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Front party, rushed to assail him just for saying the stark truth about the colonization scourge.

But with this new outspoken and equitable declaration about the brutal and heinous past of colonial France in Algeria, Mr Macron brings to the table the delicate subject of the horrendous colonization onto the ongoing French presidential campaign. 

For some observers, it is a golden opportunity to distract attention. 

At a meeting in Compiegne on Wednesday evening, Francois Fillon, now entangled in the affair of his wife and children’s supposed fictitious jobs, lambasted against these statements.

Fillon asserted to this effect: “This hatred of our history, this perpetual repentance that is unworthy of a candidate for the presidency of the republic”.

Wallerand de Saint-Just from National Front accused Macron of “stabbing  France in the back,” while Gerald Darmanin, an ally of ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy, also castigated Marcon’s statements in a tweet similarly to right-wing politician Gérard Longuet.