EELV defends its invitation to the rapper Médine to his summer days

2023-08-04 12:02:46
Rapper Médine during a demonstration with striking employees of Total Energies in front of the Gonfreville-l’Orcher refinery (Seine-Maritime), March 24, 2023. LOU BENOIST / AFP

It’s summer and the left-wing parties are trying to attract the best headliners for their back-to-school universities at the end of August. It is EELV which currently wins the prize for the most media-friendly invitation, with the arrival of the rapper Médine, on August 24, in Le Havre (Seine-Maritime). The singer’s critics, first of all the political opponents of EELV on the far right, blame him in particular for a 2015 title, Don’t Laik and the lyrics « crucifions the laicards, an album Jihad (2005), a photo, in 2014, showing him making a quenelle, a gesture popularized by comedian Dieudonné, convicted of anti-Semitism.

Marine Tondelier, number one of the Greens, admits disagreements on her positions but, listening to her latest songs, she retains that“he writes on excision, proclaims himself an ecologist” and works against police violence. As for its provocative side, “if we only want people who look like us, who have the right codes, we stay between us”, assures the one who promises to get the party out of a certain inter-self. And adds that he will ” to have success “ among young schoolchildren. And then, insists the national secretary of the party, “it is not the extreme right that decides on invitations to our summer days”.

Accused of homophobia by the RN

This invitation nevertheless revives the trial in “Islamo-leftism” targeting the party. The deputy of the National Rally (RN) Sébastien Chenu thus saw in it the fact of a “far left red and green”accused of“Islamism” and D’“homophobia”. Engaged for several years in an increasingly frontal fight with the far right, the native rapper of Le Havre is regularly targeted by requests for the cancellation of his concerts by the RN. In April, during a concert in Agen, on May 1 during a counter-demonstration in opposition to that organized by the RN in Le Havre, the artist had his audience destroy pinatas bearing the effigy of the party .

Targeted, like Jean-Luc Mélenchon, by a planned neo-Nazi terrorist attack in 2018, the rapper has since adopted rather consensual watchwords on the left. In a interview to the anti-capitalist journal Ballast, on July 15, he proclaimed his admiration for the actress and militant of Permanent Revolution Adèle Haenel and professed: “We want social justice, we want to fight the far right, we want to put an end to the mechanisms of oppression that affect both LGBT populations, both racialized people, and feminists. » In September, he will also perform with the Communists, on the feast of theHumanity.