“Escautpont wakes up in shock! » Swastikas and homophobic inscriptions were drawn on the night of Tuesday May 7 to Wednesday May 8 on the war memorial in Escautpont, a town located north of Valenciennes (North), announced the town hall, which will file a complaint. “Last night, the war memorial which will be inaugurated this morning at the end of the memorial ceremony was tagged with swastikas and homophobic inscriptions,” we can read on the town hall’s Facebook page.
“By this abject act, it is the memory of our deaths for France which is insulted”, as well as the mayor, who “is directly attacked both in his function and in his personal life”, continues the town hall. She specifies that a complaint must be filed and assures that “hate and attempts at division will not win.”
The national secretary of the French Communist Party, Fabien Roussel, also a deputy for the North, denounced to Agence France-Presse the tags “revealing an increasingly extremist climate”, a “rise of extreme right-wing and xenophobic, anti-Semitic, homophobic ideas”.
Posters also tagged in Mulhouse
The monument was to be inaugurated as part of the commemorations of May 8, 1945. “For the mayor, for the elected officials, for the municipal staff and more generally for the entire city, this morning was to be a morning of commemoration, joy and pride …Well, it will be so! We hope to see many of you! », concluded the town hall on its Facebook message, before thanking the “municipal agents who mobilized this morning to give the monument all the dignity that it should inspire in us”.
In Mulhouse on Wednesday morning, “neo-Nazis” tagged the posters of Léon Deffontaines, head of the communist list in the European elections, Mr. Roussel also pointed out, photos of posters with the inscriptions “Death to the Reds” and “88” at support.