Environmentalists have “looked for the buzz” and “made a mistake” by inviting the rapper Médine to their summer days, said Wednesday the head of the EELV list for Europeans Marie Toussaint, for whom the party has “set a trap “.

“I assume we made a mistake,” she told France Info, adding that the Greens “had it all wrong from A to Z”.

“The problem is not Medina, it’s us. We looked for the buzz, we got it, in the worst way possible”, she insisted, judging that anti-Semitism is “a subject too important, too serious, for us to make political stunts”.

The controversial rapper has been at the heart of a controversy for ten days because of a pun on X (ex-Twitter) qualifying the essayist Rachel Khan, Jewish and granddaughter of deportees, of “resKHANpée”.

In an interview with Le Parisien, Médine acknowledged a “clumsy tweet” on Wednesday, saying that “anti-Semitism is a poison” that he has been fighting “for a long time”.

“Rotten puns are not what the country needs,” said Ms. Toussaint, regretting that environmentalists have “set (themselves) a trap”.

“We are accused both by the friends of Medina and by (his) enemies, it proves that there is something wrong”, she developed, evoking the attacks from the majority , but also of Jean-Luc Mélenchon who judged the Greens “subject to what will be said of the hypocrites”.

“We are not subject to anyone and certainly not to Mr. Mélenchon”, she retorted, telling the Insoumis leader that “when we have an ally who is in difficulty, we do not take advantage of it to put the head under water”.

At the same time, LFI leaders Mathilde Panot and Manuel Bompard affirmed with one voice that “Medina is not anti-Semitic”. The first hammered on France Inter that the rapper was “victim of a despicable cabal led by the far right, hand in hand with the macronists”, while the second denounced on RMC and BFMTV an “odious, misleading process and infamous” in the face of which “to give in as (ecologists) do is a fault”.

08/23/2023 09:53:45 –         Paris (AFP) –         © 2023 AFP