An African-heritage lawmaker in France has sparked outrage by seemingly hailing the so-called ‘Great Replacement’ of the native people of the country by foreigners.
Carlos Martens Bilongo, a member of the National Assembly for the far-left La France Insoumise (France in Rebellion/LFI), in an appearance on the “African Bookstore” podcast, appeared to boast that minorities are outbreeding the native French people, Le Journal du Dimanche reported.
Without explicitly stating the groups he was discussing, the Val-d’Oise MP, who was born in France to Congolese (DRC) and Angolan parents, urged people to “show them that we are more numerous and that we are more intelligent.”
“If we’ve had more children than them, too bad for them. If they wanted to have children, they should have just loved each other, made love, and had children. We managed to have them. Our mothers managed to raise us properly,” Bilongo continued.
While the LFI lawmaker was seemingly attempting to keep his comments sufficiently vague, one of the interviewers even noted that his comments appeared to vindicate the concept of the “Great Replacement” coined by French philosopher Renaud Camus, which stipulates that global elites see their populations as fungible economic units rather than human beings with a right to preserve their cultures in their homelands.
Although Western legacy media outlets and establishment politicians have sought to cast the view as a “far-right conspiracy theory”, a recent national survey has found that half of the French public believe that the Great Replacement is real and that elites are actively attempting to replace them in their own country.
While the mass migration experienced by France in recent decades has come with significant destabilisation to social cohesion, with the country frequently experiencing terror attacks and race riots, far-left LFI leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon has previously sought to blame native French people who object to the transformation for the turmoil.
“When I was born, one in ten French people had a foreign grandparent, now it’s one in four. Consequently, those who call themselves native French pose a serious problem to the cohesion of society,” the former presidential candidate said last year.
With many working class voters — particularly in rural areas — stubbornly rejecting his brand of multicultural socialism, Mélenchon has actively sought to ingratiate his leftist party with ethnic minority voting blocs, in large part with Islamic backgrounds. This has led to accusations of the LFI being in bed with radical Islamist groups, notably the Muslim Brotherhood.
In response to the LFI MP Bilongo’s comments, Senator Stéphane Ravier said that he plans on filing a complaint to the public prosecutor’s office. The Reconquest politician said: “The only racism still allowed in France concerns white people; the justice system must crack down to protect them.”