“MELENCHON huh! Don’t be mistaken. In the 1st and 2nd round. Finished”. In April 2022, two days before the first round of the presidential election, the rapper Médine posted on social networks this message sent to his father, to whom he gave his power of attorney. The message is clear: it urges people to vote for the rebellious candidate. In the second round, the singer will call to vote Macron, to “block the far right”. In the world of rap, generally far from party politics, this political commitment is an exception.

This is no doubt why Médine was invited by LFI on August 26, for a “major interview” with Mathilde Panot, president of the LFI-NUPES group at the National Assembly. The controversy sparked by the singer after a tweet with anti-Semitic overtones about the essayist Rachel Khan did not compromise his visit, any more than those of the EELV days two days earlier. “There is no subject,” said Mathilde Panot, interviewed on France Inter on Wednesday. “Medine is a committed rapper, who has always been committed against all forms of discrimination”, particularly those which affect “Muslim people in this country”.

Just listening to his latest album, “Médine France”, gives a good idea of ​​the ideological proximity between the rapper and LFI. Medina says he is “rooted in (his) way”. “I don’t like flags, kepis, caps”, he enumerates, not wanting in France that he claims “neither marinière, nor baguette, nor beret”.

“I have origins and I’m proud of it, it’s the same as the iron of the Eiffel Tower”, he continues in reference to the false belief that the steel of the “Iron Lady” would come from Algeria, country of origin of his father. Médine Zaouich, of his real name, born and raised in Le Havre, also assumes not knowing how to “still not sing” the Marseillaise, and ignoring the history of France. “I never remember the dates”, he confesses in his title Allons zenfants, except for the one where “the CAF allowances” fall. “None of us will re-migrate,” he finally warns, because “France until it loves us, we will re-creolize it”.

The concept of “creolization” was precisely at the heart of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s presidential campaign in 2022. In the first round, the rebellious candidate obtained in the French suburbs – where Medina finds his main audience, his best scores. He obtained up to 50% of the votes in Seine-Saint-Denis. “It resonates with a lot of people. It is important to discuss with this kind of artist”, justified LFI to explain his participation in “Amfis”, his summer days for young rebellious people on Saturday in Valence. Thus, the rapper is an ideal relay to reach more this electoral base of the youth of the working-class neighborhoods, still strongly abstaining.

“These populations of immigrant origin who willingly listen to Medina and other rappers are imbued with an ideology which, obviously, is perfectly articulated with the rebellious ideology”, confirms the philosopher and political scientist Renée Fregosi. If the party of Jean-Luc Mélenchon holds this speech, it is “not only cynicism on his part”, analyzes the political scientist. “The anti-capitalist, anti-Western alliance was clearly enacted during the great congress of Baku in 1920. Lenin’s speech delivered to the peoples of the East who joined the Soviet Union identified the Muslim cause with that of the proletariat, in opposition to the West, against a background of anti-Semitism, explains Renée Fregosi. Because there is a historical anti-Semitic background among the former Trotskyists and communists. Marx associated the Jews with capitalism, and a certain tradition on the left has always done the same”.

Last March, at the heart of the protest against the pension reform, Médine went to the site of the TotalEnergies refinery in Normandy in support of the striking employees. An artist but above all an activist, he poses as a political mouthpiece for the working class. “Let’s go children of our neighborhoods, let’s not be denigrated”, he sings in his latest album.

At the same time, and in a less media-friendly way, his commitments lead him to support the humorist Dieudonné (“Dieudonné has contributed more to defusing subjects like racism than the reverse” he says on Rapelite) or appearing in a meeting of black supremacist Kemi Séba (according to whom international institutions like the IMF are “run by the Zionists who impose on Africa and its diaspora living conditions so excremental that the concentration camp of Auschwitz can seem like a paradise on earth”).

When these various commitments are controversial, Medina believes that he is being attacked for “the simple fact that (he is) a rapper, Muslim, committed”, and that he is the “target of the far right”. A semantics taken up in the media specific to the populations of the districts. On the controversy around Rachel Khan, the Booska-P site specializing in rap titled: “Medina, infinite political harassment”, when the rap site Raplume deplored a political-media system that seeks “false polemics” “.