French President Emmanuel Macron's ruling party has barred a Muslim woman from running for as candidate on its ticket in a local election after she wore an Islamic headscarf for a photograph that appeared on a campaign flier.
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La Republique en Marche (LaRem) said the party line was that in secular France there should be no place for the overt display of religious symbols on electoral campaign documents.
"This woman will not be an En Marche candidate," Stanislas Guerini, the party's general secretary, told RTL radio.
Macron, who prided himself on the multi-cultural, ethnically-diverse make-up of his nascent party after his 2017 election victory, has warned of the growing threat of Islamist separatism to France's core values and the republic's unity.
