LONDON: The latest row surrounding France’s ban on religious symbols at school has erupted after a group of Muslim schoolgirls visited the National Assembly wearing hijabs.
Yael Braun-Pivet, the assembly’s speaker and a member of President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist Renaissance Party, said the girls’ visit to the public gallery was “unacceptable” under the country’s secularist laws.
But other MPs hit back, accusing Braun-Pivet of Islamophobia and adopting the far-right strategy of using bans on religious clothing to target Muslims.
Students in public schools are banned from wearing religious symbols, including Christian crosses, Muslim headscarves, Jewish kippas and Sikh turbans. Civil servants face similar restrictions.
In 2023, France also banned students from wearing the abaya in public schools.
Images of the girls’ visit to the lower house of the French parliament on Wednesday were shared on social media and quickly went viral.
Braun-Pivet wrote on X: “At the very heart of the National Assembly, where the 2004 law on secularism in schools was voted, it seems to me unacceptable that young children can wear conspicuous religious symbols in the galleries … This is a question of the coherence of the republic.”
Some centrist and right-wing politicians joined in with the outcry, including Julien Odoul, an MP from the populist right-wing National Rally, who described the images as a “vile provocation.”
Others, however, said the criticism amounted to Islamophobia. Paul Vannier of the far-left France Unbowed party said Braun-Pivet “misunderstands the principle of secularism and, like the far right, she is instrumentalizing it against our Muslim fellow-citizens.”
“That she targets young children who came to visit our Assembly adds to the ignominy and the stain that her Islamophobic statement constitutes,” he wrote on X.
Marine Tondelier, leader of the Greens, said that the National Assembly’s rules did not prohibit women from wearing the hijab in the public gallery.
“But if it prohibited Islamophobia, many politicians could no longer enter,” she added.
Amid the row, politicians clashed over whether the school ban on religious symbols included school outings.
“They are part of school time and the same rules apply,” Gerard Larcher, the conservative speaker of the Senate, the upper house of the French parliament, was quoted as saying in The Times.
France’s strict secular rules are often the source of fierce debate in the country.
The government has long been accused of using the laws to target the Muslim community.
