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French President Emmanuel Macron defends himself at home after the photo of the latter alongside a young man making an obscene gesture with his finger become viral online and attracting political criticism.
During the weekend, Emmanuel Macron was on the island of St. Martin, a year after the passage of Hurricane Maria on the French Caribbean island.
During an unplanned visit to a real estate project, Macron met a young man who told the president that he had just come out of jail after serving a sentence for robbery.
"Do not make mistakes anymore, will you?" Macron said the former convict. "Your mother deserves more than that, stop messing around, think about your mother."
Eliot Blondet / AP"
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France certainly does not deserve that. It is unforgivable!
We then took a photo of the president posing with the convict on his left, wearing a white shirt and a bandanna. To the right of Macron, we see a shirtless young man showing his middle finger to the camera.
The ex-convict said Monday in the French newspaper Le Parisien that this man was his cousin and that the gesture he made "was not directed at the French president Macron".
Marine Le Pen, a far-right French politician, went to Twitter to criticize Macron.
"We do not find the words to express our indignation," writes Le Pen in a message. "France certainly does not deserve that, it is unforgivable!
The French president refused to speak directly to the incident while speaking to the press on Sunday, but said that "it's what allowed me to fight and defeat Marine Le Pen – at here today Now, I love all the children of the republic, no matter what mistakes they make. "
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I love all the children of the republic, whatever their mistakes.
Macron, 40, also said he would continue to meet the crowd on his travels, despite political criticism.
