LR and RN suspend regional subsidies for a festival to welcome the rap group Sniper

23 years after Nicolas Sarkozy’s criticism, the rappers of the Sniper collective are once again caught up in a political controversy. The Grand Est regional council, with a Republican (LR) majority, voted to suspend ” provisional ” a subsidy of 90,000 euros, which was to be allocated to the music festival Le jardin du Michel, scheduled for May in the town of Toul (Meurthe-et-Moselle).

This decision follows a request from the National Rally (RN) deputy for Moselle, Laurent Jacobelli, who demanded “that we don’t finance” the arrival of the Sniper group, which “calls for hatred” in some of his songs. The elected official points in particular to the title Francereleased 25 years ago, containing lyrics considered “violent” et “can convey hatred”according to the RN group.

Skip the ad

Sniper – France (2001)

“Thugs who dishonor France”

In 2003, Nicolas Sarkozy, then Minister of the Interior in the government of Jean-Pierre Raffarin, had already attacked this piece, describing the members of Sniper, Aketo, Tunisiano and Blacko, as “thugs who dishonor France”. “France is eating away at us to the point of no longer having confidence in its neighbor/Legislation designed to bring us down”, can be heard in particular in this title. “France is a bitch and we have been betrayed/The system is what pushes us to hate them/Hate is what makes our words vulgar/We are screwing France with a popular music trend”. The complaint then filed by the Ministry of the Interior was rejected by the criminal court and the court of appeal of Rouen, then by the Court of Cassation, ruling that the remarks chanted in the Sniper piece did not fall within the scope of the law.

Despite this precedent, the Grand Est regional council says today it wants “condition its aid on respect for a charter of republican principles and secularism”specifies our colleagues from The Republican East . The Ministry of the Interior has been contacted “in order to question him on the potential nature of incitement to racial hatred, anti-Semitism and disturbance of public order of certain words”. For its part, the regional opposition denounced a “serious attack on creative and programming freedoms”, through the voice of Bertrand Masson (Solidarity and Ecologist Left). For the moment, the Sniper group has not reacted publicly to this new affair.