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In 2013, an expulsion which would become the Leonarda affair
In 2013, an expulsion which would become the Leonarda affair
(Sensitive affairs / France 2)
“Sensitive Affairs” returns to a controversy which shook François Hollande’s five-year term. In 2013, the arrest of a schoolgirl during a school trip and her expulsion would push the high school students into the streets, set the National Assembly ablaze and crack the socialist majority… before projecting the head of state into depths of unpopularity.
The expulsion of this Roma family could, like many others, have gone unnoticed. Originally from Kosovo, the Dibrani couple and their six children arrived illegally in France in 2009. They lived in Levier, a small town in Doubs…
On January 9, 2013 at 6 a.m., the police arrived at their home to “execute the removal order”, that is to say the obligation to leave the territory, to which they were subject. But one of the girls is missing… Reached on her cell phone, Leonarda, 15 years old at the time, explains that she is on a bus with her third grade class. Never mind: the police stopped the bus to come and pick her up. Once the children are complete, they are placed with their mother on a plane to Kosovo, where they will join the father, deported the day before. The prefecture can be satisfied: things ultimately went well…
But at Leonarda’s college, in Pontarlier, it is an understatement to say that this arrest in the middle of a school trip is causing a stir. Five days later, teachers shared their indignation on the blog of the Education Without Borders Network, hosted by Mediapart. “Deeply shocked” to see “children from the Roma community sent back to countries whose language they do not speak”, and their integration efforts “brought to naught by blind and inhumane policies”, they demand their immediate return In France.
Two days later, the media took up the matter, and the controversy quickly made headlines. On October 17, eight days after Leonarda’s arrest, it was the turn of Parisian high school students to be moved by her fate. To protest against his expulsion and that of an Armenian student, they blocked several establishments.
The next day, October 18, the movement ignited. Thousands of young people demonstrated, to the great dismay of the Minister of the Interior at the time, Manuel Valls, who found himself under fire from criticism: in the street, slogans and placards from high school students demanded his resignation.
It must be said that this is not the minister’s first controversy… Three weeks before this affair, during an interview, he had attributed to the Roma a way of life that opposed their integration and a “vocation to return to Romania or Bulgaria“. Comments which had earned him an outcry on the left (and prosecutions for racial discrimination against the Roma). Already perceived as authoritarian, Manuel Valls splits within his political family, where some accuse him of hunting on the lands of the right, even the extreme right, the “Leonarda affair” will soon reach the National Assembly and divide the Socialist Party, up to the highest level of the executive…
Excerpt from “Leonarda, the teenager who defied the president”, une investigation carried out by Marine Haag, to be reviewed in “Sensitive Affairs”, a co-production between France Télévisions, France TV presse, France Inter and INA, adapted from a France Inter broadcast.
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