FrançoisFrançois Fillon's party has apologized for tweeting a caricature of Emmanuel Macron, his main rival in the race to be France's next president, that Fillon himself admitted was anti-Semitic, reports Reuters.
Fillon's conservative The Republicans tweeted an image of the independent centrist Macron with a hooked nose, wearing a top hat and carrying a red sickle with which he was cutting a cigar.
The image resembled anti-Semitic propaganda from World War Two when France's Vichy government collaborated with the Nazis and their deportation and extermination of Jews. Macron is not Jewish but the cartoon appeared to refer to his past as a Rothschild investment banker.
A day after the tweet was posted - and subsequently deleted - Fillon called the image "unacceptable" and said he understood the outrage it had caused "because it evoked the images of a dark period of our history and exploited an ideology that I have always fought against.
