French President Emanuel Macron today spoke out in favor of stripping the right to vote from those found guilty of anti-Semitic, racist, and discriminatory acts and comments, stressing that politicians must be the guardians of democracy.

They must be the guardians of the state.

“Too often, the sentences handed down to perpetrators of anti-Semitic offences and crimes seem ridiculous,” the French president said during an event to pay tribute to Ilan Halimi, a young Jewish man who was kidnapped and tortured to death in 2006 in France. “The government and parliament will work to strengthen the criminalisation of anti-Semitic and racist acts,” the French president said, without going into further detail.

Macron expressed his opposition to “Islamist anti-Semitism, the root cause of the October 7 pogrom” in Israel, to “far-left anti-Semitism, which he said rivals that of the far right and its clichés for power and wealth,” and to “anti-Semitism that uses the mask of anti-Zionism to quietly gain ground.”