French minister urged to quit for failing to sing national anthem

Paris: France’s Socialist justice minister faced calls to resign on Monday after she failed to sing the national anthem during ceremonies marking the abolition of slavery, saying that to do so would be “grandstand karaoke”.

Christine Taubira, France’s first black justice minister, remained silent during a rendition of La Marseillaise at a ceremony in Paris commemorating anti-slavery day on Saturday, in which Manuel Valls, the prime minister, and Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, were also present.

Her silence provoked anger from Geoffroy Boulard, member of the opposition UMP’s Right-wing faction, La Droite Forte.

“Taubira won’t sing the Marseillaise on the grounds that ‘she doesn’t know the words’. Resign!” he wrote on his Twitter account.

Taubira responded by saying: “Certain circumstances call more for meditation than grandstand karaoke.”

She pointed out that she had remained silent at another ceremony in the Luxembourg gardens, where she stood next to President Francois Hollande, who also kept quiet as a soloist intoned the national anthem.

“When the voice of the soloist stands out from the orchestra, I listen, and listen until the end,” she wrote.

But the opposition centre-Right UMP and far-Right Front National (FN) refused to accept her explanation.

Marine Le Pen, the FN leader, called for Taubira to be fired, saying: “This unacceptable outburst is symbolic proof of the first order of the [government’s] disdain for France and its people, who like to sing its anthem and are proud of it.”

Jean-Francois Cope, UMP president, said: “As minister of the French Republic, there are things that one mustn’t say that one does not have the right to say. In my view, she should have resigned a long time ago.”

Socialist colleagues leapt to her defence. Benoit Hamon, the education minister, said he too had been present and had not sung along so as not to “add our voices to the soloist’s”, denouncing the fact that Taubira had been “unjustly” singled out.

The minister, who has enraged French traditionalists by vocally defending gay marriage and proposing what they view as laxist penal laws, was at the centre of a racism row last year after one far-Right local politician likened her to a monkey.

Taubira was behind a May 10, 2001 law making France the first major Western country to recognise the slave trade as a crime against humanity. On Saturday, a newly elected FN mayor provoked indignation by refusing to hold an anti-slavery ceremony in his town.