Michel Barnier supports the President of the Assembly

The Prime Minister called on the President of the National Assembly, targeted this Friday, November 8 by hostile tags and slogans from opposed pro-Palestinian activists, to her visit to a university in Lyon.

The Prime Minister, Michel Barnier, supports the President of the National Assembly, Yaël Braun-Pivet, who was targeted this Friday, November 8, by hostile tags and slogans from pro-Palestinian activists opposed to her visit to a university in Lyon, but finally spoke calmly with students.

Michel Barnier spoke with Yaël Braun-Pivet on the phone at the end of the day, BFMTV learned from consistent sources, confirming information from Le Parisien. The Prime Minister called the President of the Assembly “to show her friendly and personal support” Michel Barnier's entourage declared to BFMTV.

Yaël Braun-Pivet also received a call of support from the Minister of the Interior, Bruno Retailleau. He also denounced on X a “fascist drift of activists who exploit the tragedy experienced by the Palestinians”. “Total support for Yaël Braun-Pivet, whom far-left demonstrators with anti-Semitic ideas want to ban from a university. The Republic is at home everywhere,” wrote Minister Les Républicains (LR).

Tags and demonstrators

“Yaël get out of there”, “genocidal perpetrators outside our universities”, “Free Gaza” or “Free Palestine”: several messages in large letters had been tagged during the night near the campus. Some were quickly deleted. Around 200 demonstrators continued in the same vein in the afternoon, before the arrival of the Macronist MP, chanting “criminal Israel, Yaël complicit” or “Yaël, get out of there, Lyon 3 is not You”.

“I suggested to these young people who did not want me to come, to dialogue. They did not want it, they preferred violent action”, regretted Yaël Braun-Pivet at the end of his visit, stressing that they wanted “always favor dialogue”.

“We are in a democracy, the President of the National Assembly that I am must be able to go anywhere in the territory (…) It is my role and I will never give up,” she added.

Organizations denounced his support for Israel

Several left-wing organizations, including student solidarity unions and Unef or young local LFIs, denounced her coming to Lyon 3, describing her in a press release as “an eminent figure of unconditional support for the criminal actions of the Israeli state”. “While the deaths caused by Israel's operations number in the tens of thousands (more than 41,000 dead!) Yaël Braun-Pivet once again dared to defend the delivery of weapons to a criminal state,” highlight the signatories of the press release.

On October 6, on BFMTV, she declared that “we should not disarm Israel”, in reaction to statements by Emmanuel Macron calling for an end to deliveries of weapons used to carry out fighting in Gaza.

In a short press release, the Lyon 3 Jean-Moulin University condemned “with the greatest firmness the unacceptable and scandalous inscriptions which have been tagged”, and announced that it had taken legal action. Yaël Braun-Pivet, who did not meet the demonstrators, spoke for a little over an hour with around 200 students.