Migrants tragedy: France's Marine Le Pen clashes with Nicolas Sarkozy on Twitter over deaths

The leader of France's far-right Front National (FN) party has accused Nicolas Sarkozy of having "ignited a fire in the region" by deciding to support military intervention in Libya in 2011. Marine Le Pen's attack comes after the former president said he hopes for "a real immigration policy of the European Union" following the Mediterranean migrant tragedy that claimed more than 900 lives.

While French President François Hollande denounced the stinking as a "catastrophe" and called people smugglers "terrorists" on French TV's Canal+ on Sunday (19 April), Sarkozy expressed his "emotion and (his) sadness after the shipwreck in the Mediterranean" in a Tweet.

Le Pen, however, blasted Sarkozy's tweet, questioning how he "dared play firefighter" before accusing him of having, by his "foreign policy, set fire to the region and increased migratory pressure", without alluding to the French military intervention in Libya, which Sarkozy approved in 2011 when he was still president and strongly booed by the FN leader.

Referring to "frightening" illegal immigration numbers coming out of Libya, Le Pen said the "grisly results of this illegal immigration (which) is heavily growing with dozens or even hundreds of additional deaths (...) are the direct consequences of the strategic mistake that was the unforgivable intervention in Libya in 2011, led by Nicolas Sarkozy and supported by François Hollande."

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/migrants-tragedy-frances-marine-le-pen-clashes-nicolas-sarkozy-twitter-over-migrants-death-1497339