In Le Havre, environmentalists are trying to make people forget the Medina controversy

Environmentalists met in Le Havre from Thursday, in the docks, not far from the port. Over the hours leading up to the end of the day, the fateful meeting with the controversial rapper Médine and the national secretary Marine Tondelier, their fragile boat showed signs of weakness, despite a marked desire to get out of the way. polemic.

Already, like all the other parties of the left within the Nupes, the ecologists accused the blow before the summer of their failure to fight the pension reform wanted by the government... They are also struggling, specifically, despite all their goodwill, to take on board the movements of young people involved in the climate movement, sometimes in a very radical way. Added to this, therefore, is the difficulty of finding a way to working-class urban districts. The polemic with Medina expresses this in a blatant way.

EELV MP for Paris, member of an internal party commission dedicated to the fight against anti-Semitism, created less than two years ago, Eva Sas is not far from collapsed. She recognizes him. “ We have a huge deficit of relations with working-class neighborhoods, we really need to remedy that and it could have been a good idea to invite him. Why not ? But no, that was a really bad idea. Why didn't she and her group object, at least after the anti-Semitic tweet against essayist Rachel Khan? The answer is fuzzy. She herself, like many, did not know him very well. With the torpor of the summer, the very open way of environmentalists to conduct their internal democracy, their taste for debate and risks, the choice of the party's executive office has not been amended.

“On anti-Semitism, we cannot afford to be ambiguous, laments Eva Sas. All the work that we are doing internally is now obscured and it will take us years to recover from this affair on this level…  ” Her annoyance is all the stronger as she sees the profits that their oppositions derive from it, to the extreme right as at Renaissance. “The controversy is amplified, she says, by those who want to silence us. With them, everything is good to discredit us. They know that we are fundamentally right but take advantage of the situation to change nothing. »

Candidate for the European Ecologists, nominated by the party in July, Marie Toussaint embodies the opposition of the party to this invitation. She had lapidary words about it on Franceinfo. Thursday morning before her first big speech as a candidate, inevitably a little uncomfortable next to Marine Tondelier, she wanted to put out the fire. “ I said what I had to say about Medina. There is no conflict with Marine Tondelier. We are two women who say what we have to say in the period, our share of truth. There is no question of "feeding this story of divided environmentalists".

In front of the militants, in a long speech, auguring oratorical talents despite a discreet temperament, she tried to hang up the wagons. "'Marine, we're together! Cyrielle, Sandrine Yannick, we are together! Will we always agree on everything? I give it to you in a thousand: no. But we have a duty to succeed. "Marine, you have my full trust and support," she insisted. We may have disagreements but they will not lead to division… ” A way of hoping. Several, on Thursday, including the former presidential candidate and MEP, Yannick Jadot, made the choice not to go and listen to Medina…