Jean-Luc Melenchon, the leader of the French Party of the Left, has said that Socialist Finance Minister Pierre Moscovici, who is Jewish, “thought in international finances, not in French." After being criticized for making anti-Semitic statements, Melenchon denied he was referring to the minister’s religion.
He made the comment in a press conference Saturday on the sidelines of the Left Party convention in Bordeaux, referring to Pierre Moscovici, France’s finance minister. Melenchon referred to Moscovici as “one of those 17 Eurogroup bastards” putting pressure on Cyprus which currently seeks a bail-out solution to its debt crisis. “Moscovici behaves like someone who has stopped thinking in French, like someone who thinks only in the language of international finance,” Melenchon told a press conference .
The leader of the far-left group was one of the presidential candidates last year and is a former member of the governing Socialist Party (PS). Harlem Desir, first secretary of the PS, told the newspaper 'Le Monde' that the statement was “unacceptable.” He added: “We did not expect to hear this 1930s vocabulary from the mouth of a French republican and even less from a leader of the left.”
Interior Minister Manuel Valls said: "Imitating the language of the extreme-right serves no good."
Melenchon denied his comments were anti-Semitic or connected in any way to Moscovici’s Jewish origins, adding that “if Moscovici were ever threatened for being Jewish, he would find all of us there to defend him.”
