The graffiti artist had caricatured Macron as Adolf Hitler with a black suit and dark eyes. In place of the dictatorship’s mustache, Lekto had written the numbers “49.3”, a reference to the constitutional article the French government used to push through pension reform without parliamentary approval.
French President Emmanuel Macron has not yet taken legal action against the man, but Avignon says it will remove the fresco “as soon as possible” at the request of the president. This is reported by the local radio station ‘France Bleu’. The graffiti artist wrote at the foot of his work that it was intended as “satire”, but that is not enough for the authorities.
Satirical or not, Lekto has been prosecuted before for “incitement to hatred”. In September, he must also stand trial for another mural in which Macron was depicted as a puppet of a French economist, who had eventually filed a complaint. The artist is accused of “provoking discrimination, violence and hatred through anti-Semitic statements”.