A controversial “OK” hand gesture, linked to white power messaging, has caused an uproar in Europe for the leader of France’s far-right National Rally Marine Le Pen, The Guardian reported Wednesday.
Le Pen was in Tallinn, Estonia to meet MPs from the country’s far-right EKRE party, the report said, when she made the controversial hand signal, and a picture was taken and posted on Facebook.
Once the picture went viral, Le Pen asked for its removal, The Guardian reported.
The meeting between Le Pen and the party, which recently became part of the country’s coalition government, was part of cross-continent negotiations on setting up a new bloc of nationalist and far-right forces after European elections next week, the newspaper said.
Le Pen, The Guardian reported, made the OK hand signal along with Ruuben Kaalep, 25, an EKRE MP and leader of its youth movement before the politician uploaded the photo to his Facebook page.
“I was in a selfie at his request, making a signal that to me means ‘ok’,” Le Pen told Agence FrancePresse.
“I was later told that it may have an alternative meaning,” Le Pen told AFP. “As soon as I became aware of that, I immediately asked that the photo be removed from the Facebook account. I’d never heard of the second meaning of this trivial gesture.”
This is not the first time Kaalep’s Facebook page has featured the same sign, the report said, and although that particular photo appears to have been deleted from Kaalep’s Facebook page, others in which he made the same sign are still online.
EKRE party leaders, the father and son Mart and Martin Helme, made the gesture last month during their swearing-in ceremony as ministers in the new government, The Guardian reported. The former Estonian president Toomas Hendrik Ilves complained on Twitter the pair had made a “white-power sign.”
– WN.com, Jack Durschlag