Staff at the French Sunday newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche (JDD) on Wednesday voted to extend their strike action. The publication has been in turmoil since the shock appointment of far-right Geoffroy Lejeune as the new editor last week.
Geoffroy Lejeune's appointment as the new editor of the influential weekly newspaper prompted a mass walkout from staff, which has paralysed the paper and its website.
Ninty-seven percent of staff voted to continue the strike action until at least Thursday when a new vote would be held, the SDJ union said in a press release.
Economy, not ideology
34-year-old Lejeune was until recently editor of the far-right weekly magazine Valeurs Actuelles, helping to raise its profile through provocative headlines and caustic attacks on the country's politicians and intellectuals.
Driven by his close relationship to several senior far-right political figures, Lejeune "expresses ideas that are the opposite of the values that the JDD has carried over the last 75 years," the union wrote.
The JDD, part of the Lagadère media empire, is France's only national Sunday paper, and has sales of around 140,000 copies as well as an online version.
Arnaud Lagadère, owner of Lagardere group, which was recently acquired by conservative billionaire Vincent Bolloré, said he stood by the decision to hire Lejeune.
"I do not choose Geoffroy with the aim of changing the editorial line, but of course, the JDD must also know how to adapt to changes in the world as we have always done in the past," Lagadère told French news agency AFP on Tuesday.
"I made this decision alone. Neither Vincent Bolloré, nor anyone from Vivendi [mass media holding company owned by Bolloré], was involved", he insisted, adding that it was an "economic choice, and not at all an ideological one".
Republican values under threat
The NGO Reporters without Borders (RSF) held a special event on Tuesday evening at the Théâtre Libre in central Paris, attended by hundreds of personalities from the media and left-wing politics.
"Bolloré is a businessman who bullies his media employees and could destabilise the sector," the RSF says.
A petition against Lejeune's appointment, signed by over 600 people, was published in Le Monde on Tuesday.
32 heures après le lancement des invitations, près de 1000 personnes au meeting de @RSF_inter au Théâtre libre à Paris, pour l’indépendance éditoriale, en solidarité avec la rédaction du JDD. De nombreuses personnalités dans la salle. Un immense merci. https://t.co/gtoPrJRouq pic.twitter.com/g1TazLlxNa
— Christophe Deloire (@cdeloire) June 27, 2023
"Legally speaking, the JDD can become what it wants, as long as it respects the law," France's Culture Minister Abdul-Malak wrote on Twitter on Sunday. "But for our republican values, how can you not be alarmed?"
Eight former editors of the newspaper have described Lejeune's nomination as a "provocation and the demonstration that the far-right is now installing itself calmly in the media".
French 'Fox news'
Bolloré, a conservative Catholic from northwest France, has been gradually expanding his empire to take in TV channels, the magazine Paris Match, radio station Europe 1 and lately the JDD.
After acquiring news channel iTele, he provoked a strike of 31 days in 2016, gutted most of the staff and turned it into CNews, a conservative platform dubbed "France's Fox News" by critics.
"Bolloré is a specialist in taking an axe to media that he buys," Christophe Deloire, secretary general of RSF, also wrote on Twitter.
RSF published a report his constant attacks against free press in 2021.
"The JDD, in its current form, no longer has any future" because "Vincent Bolloré wants to make an ideological press in the service of the far right", the former socialist president François Hollande said, quoted by AFP.
Anti-Semitic, racist headlines
Immigration, crime, alleged left-wing media bias, "woke" teachers, "anti-white" ethnic minorities, as well as the spread of Islamism were subjects covered by Valeurs Actuelles under Lejeune.
"Save white heterosexual 50-year-old men," read one of his last front-page headlines in May.
In 2019, the publication was criticised by around 400 academics in a joint letter after a vicious and highly personal diatribe against Benjamin Stora, a renowned Jewish historian of French colonial history, who viewed the article as anti-Semitic.
The magazine has also repeatedly targeted Jewish financier George Soros, calling him the "billionaire plotting against France" in a 2018 frontpage headline.
In 2021, the publication was found guilty of racist hate speech after it published a fictional story and cartoons depicting one of the country's most prominent black MPs as a nude slave in chains and an iron collar.
Lejeune also endorsed far-right media commentator Eric Zemmour during his campaign for the presidency last year.
He is a close friend of Marion Marechal, the niece of far-right founder Jean-Marie Le Pen.
(with AFP)
