UK Edition
French mayor's poster campaign accused of exploiting murder of local woman tied to rail tracks
A far-Right French mayor has been accused of exploiting the death of a woman who was tied to rail tracks by featuring it in his campaign to bring high speed TGV trains to his town.
The "misogynistic" posters that Robert Ménard plastered around Béziers, southwestern France, depict a woman tied to the tracks with the slogan: "With the TGV, she would have suffered less."
The image has appalled women's rights activists because they say it tactlessly exploits a true-life incident in which a local man murdered his wife by tying her to the tracks before throwing himself under a train.
Alerted to the campaign, Laurence Rossignol, France's former women's rights minister tweeted: "She was called Emilie, she was 34 with four children. In June 2017, her husband murdered her by tying her to the TGV tracks."
She added: "The disgraceful Robert Ménard is killing her a second time. I demand immediate withdrawal (of the the poster."
Ms Rossignol said she was filing a legal complaint with the local prosecutor for "condoning violence against women and 'feminicide'".
Marlène Schiappa, Emmanuel Macron's gender equality minister, also said she would call on the local state prefect to launch an inquiry, tweeting: "Yet another odious campaign and what's more coming from an elected official."
"He is using a woman's body to pass populist messages and places her centre stage as a victim of violence," she added.
No stranger to controversy, the outspoken Mr Ménard said he was "astonished" by the "paranoid" reactions of politically correct officials that "speak volumes about the moral ordering weighing our country down".
The same, he claimed "would have burned" Johnny Hallyday, the late rocker "in 1960" and Charlie Hebdo, the satirical cartoon weekly targeted by terrorists, "in 1970".
"This was a picture of a cowboy with a cowboy's wife (on the tracks). You'd need to have a pretty warped mind to make any links (to the murder)," he said.
But Raphaëlle Rémy-Leleu of Osez le Féminisme (Dare Feminism), said: "So they just by chance came up with this idea of a woman being run over by a train? Such lies and hatred must stop in politics."
The tied-up woman was not the only controversial poster in the campaign. Another shows a woman with her legs open and an obstetrician holding a model train like a bay, with the slogan: "Well are you going to give birth?"
Mr Ménard has a long history of shock campaigns. In 2015, he hung up posters of migrants with beards warning "they're arriving in the city centre".
In September, he criticised a drop in state funding to towns with a picture of a man strangling a woman.