Race joke results in suspension

JUST three days before the cantonale elections, President Sarkozy’s right-wing UMP party has suspended a candidate for making racist jokes.

It comes as the party prepares to launch its debate on a secular society and the publication of figures showing the Muslim population could be far lower than previously thought.

Josiane Plataret, who was standing in the Ardèche canton of Privas, had put anti-Muslim and anti-Arab jokes on her Facebook page, including one that said “Long live pigs”.

In a press release, she said her comments were particularly inappropriate as she was of foreign origin herself: her mother was Italian.

Interior minister Claude Guéant has tried to calm the French Muslim Council (CFCM) in advance of the national debate on a lay society, due on April 5. He met delegates to say the debate would be held under republican principles and had to meet the expectations of the French people for the “sake of national unity and guarantee the free exercise of all religions”.

However, the CFCM has said it will boycott the debate which, it told the minister, just opened the “floodgates on abuses and misunderstandings”.

Muslims feel they are being stigmatised and won a small victory when Mr Guéant said that the debate would not include calls for prayers to be said in French, not Arabic. The minister said it was not constitutionally possible to ban prayers in Arabic, just as it was not possible to ban prayers in Portuguese, Hebrew or English.

The two sides met as figures were being published showing the Muslim population in France was far less than the five to six million previously thought. A study by official statistical bodies Insee and Ined said only 2.1million people between 18 and 50 gave their religion as Islam.

Islam is the second largest religion in France, behind Roman Catholicism (11.5m believers) but ahead of Protestantism (500,000), Buddhism (150,000) and Judaism (125,000).