His message aroused indignation in the majority and beyond, on the first day of the commemorations of the 80th anniversary of the Rafle du Vél d’Hiv. “80 years ago, the collaborationists of the Vichy regime organized the Vel d’Hiv roundup. Do not forget these crimes, today more than ever, with a President of the Republic who honors Pétain and 89 RN deputies, ”tweeted the leader of the LFI deputies Mathilde Panot on Saturday at the end of the day.
Mathilde Panot’s tweet was widely seen as confusing. If he was “liked” by more than 3,800 Twitter users, he especially received nearly 4,900 responses this Sunday morning. Macron’s supporters are numerous there, but they are not the only ones. Many people ask the Insoumise to withdraw his tweet, reminding him of his clumsiness against Élisabeth Borne. On July 6, responding to the Prime Minister’s general policy speech, Mathilde Panot told her: “Madame Borne, it must be said, you are a survivor. “Several people, like the philosopher Raphaël Enthoven, had then denounced the use of the word “survivor”.
Jewish and resistant, the father of Elisabeth Borne had been deported during the Second World War (1939-1945) to Auschwitz by the Nazis. The rebellious MP then denied any anti-Semitic remarks, and said she wanted to talk about the situation in the Assembly, where the deputies supporting the Prime Minister only have a relative majority.
“No limit in indecency”
“After treating Elisabeth Borne as survivor, we thought we would no longer hear Mathilde Panot slipping. It was obviously bad to know her ”, thus reproached the former minister Nathalie Loiseau. “Every day I wonder if you will be able to do worse than the day before… And each time the glass ceiling of stupidity and indignity is shattered…”, indignantly LREM MP Anne-Laurence Petel. “No limit in indecency”, also reprimanded the Minister of Labor Olivier Dussopt. The writer Tristane Banon also fiercely criticized Panot’s tweet, others, like Pierre Henry, worrying about “the loss of bearings of activists who have been instructed to create conflict for years”.
“Sweep in front of your door”, retorted the president of the National Assembly ad interim Jordan Bardella, furious at the amalgam, him, between the Vichy regime and the arrival of 89 RN deputies in the Assembly. “Anti-Semitism today in France comes from the Islamist ideology with which your party flirts. It is her that our Jewish compatriots in the 93 are fleeing. It is with her and the CCIF that you paraded in Paris in November 2019, ”he said.
Deputy Nupes Jérôme Guedj wanted to remind him that “when we are legitimately offended by risky and offensive equivalences, we refrain from giving in to them”. And to recall that “in the same way as LFI≠RN, Macron≠Pétain”.
Olivier Faure curried
Mathilde Panot was not the only one to spark controversy on Twitter. In the morning, the First Secretary of the PS Olivier Faure had published a tweet paying tribute “to the 12,884 French people arrested on July 16 and 17, 1942 during the Roundup of Vél d’Hiv”. He was crushed, in particular by the former head of information on TF1 Robert Namias, who reproached him for not writing that they were Jews. He reiterated his message to salute the memory of “12,884 French Jews arrested on July 16 and 17, 1942 during the Vel d’Hiv Roundup, to those who never returned, to all those who survived. Our duty is never to forget and to fight relentlessly against anti-Semitism”.
In 2018, for the centenary of the end of the First World War, President Emmanuel Macron had called Pétain a “great soldier” during the Great War, who had also “led disastrous choices” afterwards. These contrasting remarks had raised surprise and criticism. To the point that the president had changed the course of another commemoration by not mentioning the name of the head of the Vichy regime, struck with national indignity in 1945.