French politicians call for end to ‘conspiracy of silence’ over allegations of sexual harassment

More than 500 French politicians and activists have called for an end to a “conspiracy of silence” about alleged sexual misbehaviour by politicians after a senior Green MP was accused of groping and harassing female colleagues

Denis Baupin, 53, denies the allegations but has resigned as vice-president [deputy speaker] of the National Assembly until investigations are carried out.

His wife, Emmanuelle Cosse, a former leader of the French Green party, now minister for housing, said on Tuesday that she had complete confidence in her husband.

“These are extremely serious claims, which should be settled in court if they are true – but also if they are not true,” Ms Cosse said.

Mr Baupin’s lawyer said that the allegations, some of which date back 15 years, were “mendacious, defamatory and baseless”.

Four green female politicians, who made the claims, said they had spoken out because Mr Baupin had “hypocritically” joined a group of male politicians who spoke out against sexism in politics in March.

They said it was time finally to confront the sense of sexual impunity of some male politicians in France, which had persisted despite the series of scandals which engulfed the former IMF chief and French finance minister Dominique Strauss-Kahn from May 2011.

One of the accusers, Sandrine Rousseau, is the official spokeswoman for the French green party, Europe-Ecologie-les Verts (EELV).

She told the news website Mediapart and France Inter radio that Mr Baupin groped her during a party meeting near Paris in October 2011.

“In the corridor outside the meeting hall,” he came up to me. “He pushed me up against the wall while holding my chest and tried to kiss me. I pushed him away violently.”

Isabelle Attard, member of parliament for Calvados in Normandy, who left the EELV in 2013, said Mr Baupin had bombarded her with “almost daily provocative, salacious text messages”. Similar allegations were made by two other local, green politicians, Elen Debost, assistant mayor of Le Mans, and Annie Lahmer, a green councillor in the western Paris suburbs.

Ms Debost said she had received “sexually suggestive text messages” from Mr Baupin for several months “despite making it clear to him that I was not interested”.

A petition signed by 500 politicians and political activists, calling themselves, the “End the Omerta Collective” was published in the centre-left newspaper Libération. The signatories, mostly women and mostly green or left wing, said it was time to end the conspiracy of silence which they claimed surrounded sexual harassment in French politics.

The petition condemned “the absence of action by political parties and the difficulty that they have in even admitting that the problem exists – although in hushed voices everyone speaks about it”.

A similar petition was circulated by female journalists in France last May complaining about sexism and sexual harassment by male French politicians.