The lead candidate for French President Emmanuel Macron’s party in upcoming European elections said she was tricked into taking a photo with members of a “neo-Nazi group.”
“On Sunday, I was approached by men asking me for a photo. On principle, I don’t usually refuse, and I accepted as I do every time,” Valerie Hayer, heading the Renaissance party list, wrote on X.
Prominently visible alongside a smiling Hayer in the photo is one of the men’s T-shirts, whose logo aping the North Face outdoor brand reads “The White Race,” and in smaller text “Save European Identity.”
“This was a trap set up for me by activists from a neo-Nazi group,” Hayer said.
She added that the men — whose faces were blurred out in the photo circulated on messaging service Telegram — had used “shameful methods of the far right, which I fight against with all my might.”
Hayer said she had “not had time to notice the racist slogans on their clothing.”
The encounter took place a day after a far-right gathering in Paris where participants commemorated the 1994 death of Sébastien Deyzieu, a committed member of the avowedly antisemitic Œuvre française movement, which was forcibly dissolved by the French government in 2013.
Hayer came under attack from the fiercely anti-Macron hard-left party France Unbowed (LFI), whose leader Jean-Luc Melenchon said that “no sane person would present themselves alongside such perpetrators of ethnic violence.”
The Macron list is languishing a distant second to the far-right National Rally (RN) in polling, less than a month ahead of European Parliament elections.
The incident is the latest blow for Hayer, 38, after she was widely seen by analysts as coming out second best in a televised debate against the head of RN’s list Jordan Bardella, earlier this month.
Some polls have also indicated that the ruling party faces a tight race even for second place against the Socialist alliance led by former commentator Raphael Glucksmann, who is credited with running a dynamic campaign.
The European elections, in which European Union citizens will elect representatives to the union’s legislative body, are slated to take place June 6-9.