"There always has to be one. When there's one, it's OK. It's when there are a lot of them that there are problems." These words spoken by France's interior minister, Brice Hortefeux, were caught on camera last week during the ruling UMP party’s summer gathering in Seignosse in south-west France. The comments appear to be in reference to a young UMP member of Algerian origin, and they have spurred a growing controversy.

After the footage was published on the website of French newspaper Le Monde, the minister quickly countered that he had made "no reference to any ethnic origin, be it North African, Arab, African or other.” Confronted by reporters on Thursday evening, Brice Hortefeux said he was in fact replying to people who wanted to take pictures of him. “I was in a hurry to leave," the minister said, adding that there had been some jokes about his own origins from the Auvergne region in central France.

The young activist involved, 22-year-old Amine Benalia-Brouch, said he believed the minister. "If the remarks were racist I would have responded because they would have amounted to a personal attack,” said Amine, who was born in France from an Algerian father and a Portuguese mother. On Friday morning, the young man posted his own video on the Web, exonerating Hortefeux.

Reason for resignation

But Amine’s pardon has done little to calm outcries from the opposition. "The question is not even whether he should resign, but how he could possibly remain part of the government," said Socialist Party spokesman Benoît Hamon. Socialist leader Martine Aubry said she was "shocked and dismayed". These sentiments were echoed by several anti-racism associations, for whom the minister’s words were clear examples of prejudice.

 
Faced with a growing controversy, the government has rallied behind the interior minister. Appearing on TF1 television channel on Thursday, Prime Minister François Fillon denounced "a very scandalous campaign of denigration”. Xavier Bertrand, the UMP’s secretary general, said that the incident only served to prove that the political left was “capable of anything” in order to harm his party.

‘We do not broadcast such material lightly’

For its part, Le Monde’s website has defended its decision to release the video and denied that some of the content may have been removed. "The words that are at the heart of the controversy were not taken out of context," said Alexis Delcambre, editor in chief of Monde.fr. "There are one or two minutes of discussion before. And we hear that the minister is not the first person to indulge in racist language. I do not see any ambiguity."

Delcambre said the decision to broadcast such material was not taken lightly. “The fact that it is Web content doesn’t mean it is not serious,” he added.