Excluded from the Assembly, the rebellious deputy Thomas Portes “assumes” his tweet against Olivier Dussopt

“I’ll do the tweet again if I had to do it again.” The rebellious deputy Thomas Portes, excluded 15 days from the National Assembly for a tweet targeting the Minister of Labor Olivier Dussopt, “assume” his gesture and denounced “a disproportionate political sanction”Saturday, February 11, during the demonstration against the pension reform in Paris.

“It is a disproportionate sanction, it is a political sanction which aims to prevent a vote by a deputy against the pension reform in the Hemicycle”, denounced the elected official of Seine-Saint-Denis at the microphone of BFMTV. Thomas Portes reiterated that his message was not “not a call for hatred” And “that if it had been misinterpreted by people, [il] regretted it”.

The rebellious deputy was excluded for 15 days of sittings, after having posted on social networks a photo where he posed, with his tricolor scarf, his foot resting on a ball bearing the effigy of Olivier Dussopt. “If a deputy must be sanctioned for a political tweet, it is a very serious precedent which opens in this country”he lamented.

“A step that should not be taken”

What Thomas Portes did is not “the smartest thing we can do in the period”noted for his part Olivier Faure, the first secretary of the Socialist Party, also present in the Parisian procession. “But finally, from there to wanting to sanction in this way and to consider that we can throw a smokescreen on the fight he is waging, the fight we are waging, there, there is a step that he cannot must not cross”added the socialist deputy.

Thomas Portes’ tweet was at the center of eruptive debates in the Hemicycle on Friday, with a suspension of the session for several hours. The deputies, currently stopped at article 2 out of the 20 that make up the text, still have some 16,000 amendments to study until the deadline of February 17.