First, the astonishment. Then, the anxiety, immense, in front of such a gloubi-bulga of words, fights, ideas. “We are going through an unprecedented social crisis, a massive attack on freedoms under Macron, an ultra-early drought and a food war is looming. The Parisian made its front page on the dress of Muslim women. For this newspaper like many others: Islamophobia sells. Especially when it attacks women.” So tweets Mathilde Panot, president of the group La France insoumise at the National Assembly. Because stupidity spares no one, here is the elected official challenged a few hours later, still on Twitter, by one of her colleagues, LFI deputy Thomas Portes: “Islamophobia sells. Behind it also kills. to vomit.” It happens that by observing the hasty reactions of each other on social networks, we are surprised to find them, sometimes, a little silly, low ceiling, or that we regret that all this, often, is missing of nuance. But there is, in the contest of indignation in which the two rebellious elected officials are engaged, so much more than a missing nuance or an access of stupidity.
Mathilde Panot’s amalgams announce the worst for the left, her left in any case, the one that delights in assigning identity and sees the sabotage of secularism as social progress. The abaya, this loose dress covering the body, the forms of women, becomes under the pen of the elected LFI “the outfit of Muslim women”. Reduction of Muslim women to their dress, reduction of their dress to clothing claimed by extremist clerics… “While speaking in place of those she claims to defend, the philosopher Raphaël Enthoven protests in L’Express. Assignment and paternalism Identitarianism and condescension.” And here are the women embarked with Panot in a struggle for the wearing of a covering garment imposed not by a religion, but by the rigorous interpretation of that one. What an incredible wind of freedom is blowing on the left and on feminism.
Mathilde Panot’s indignation suffers from another paradox: the hierarchy of struggles. Regretting that the daily is interested in issues related to Islam and secularism while many evils are shaking the world and society, the elected LFI means that certain subjects should be passed over in silence in order to leave room for great, to the real problems. It’s curious among the Insoumis this need to have selective indignation. A year ago, almost to the day, the ecologist mayor of the city of Grenoble Eric Piolle hit the headlines by putting on the agenda of his municipal council the authorization to wear the burkini in the swimming pools of his city. Did Mathilde Panot tweet to express her astonishment, even her dismay, at this choice? No doubt the “social crisis”, the “ultra-early drought”, the “food war” had not yet struck people’s minds in May 2022.
Difficult not to detect in his cry of anger of the day an abandonment. That of secularism of course but also, above all, that of universalism. A few days earlier, LFI deputy François Ruffin apologized after declaring that a law on gender change at 16 without parental consent was not “what we must place at the heart of our project. “. He intended to defend a social project addressing everyone before addressing a community. In a few hours, he backpedaled, scared. Is the left of the left doomed to become an identity left?