The presence of the mayor of Le Havre at the summer days of Europe Ecology-The Greens had been considered for a time for a word of welcome. Édouard Philippe will not finally go to the event, which is held from Thursday August 24 in the Norman city, while EELV is entangled in a controversy around the presence of the rapper Médine. The former Prime Minister “will welcome a number of elected EELV who have asked to see him at the town hall, in a republican way and with pleasure”, specifies his entourage.
The leaders of EELV have been spreading their differences for several days around the presence of Medina, who must dialogue Thursday with the national secretary of the environmentalist party, Marine Tondelier. Accusations of anti-Semitism against the singer were revived by one of his recent messages on X (ex-Twitter) targeting essayist Rachel Khan. Several party officials have criticized his presence and the mayors of Bordeaux, Pierre Hurmic, and Strasbourg, Jeanne Barseghian, have indicated that they will not participate in these back-to-school days.
Édouard Philippe devoted a passage to the rapper from Le Havre in one of his books published in 2017. He then called him a “destroyer of republican secularism”, while adding that he was “probably more complex than people say” . “He is attached to his city and he wrote a piece that testifies to it with a certain tenderness. His texts play with all the codes of a certain rap: we live in ghettos; after having colonized our parents, France hates us, us sons of immigrants; and the Republic oppresses us as Muslims,” the former prime minister and chairman of the Horizons party also wrote.
The Minister of Industry Roland Lescure had already made it known that he was giving up going to the EELV days. Several dozen parliamentarians from the majority have asked EELV to give up inviting the rapper, who is also invited to the back-to-school event of La France insoumise.
