Candidate Of French Muslim Party With Ties To Islamists To Run In French Presidential Election

Alger­ian media is report­ing Nag­ib Azuer­gi, co-founder and pres­i­dent of the Union des Démoc­rates Musul­mans Français (UDMF), a French Mus­lim par­ty with ties to Islamists, has announced his run in the 2022 French Pres­i­den­tial Elec­tions. Accord­ing to the Obser­vAl­gerie arti­cle:

Novem­ber 20, 2021 “Faced with the dan­ger­ous iden­ti­ty shift that our politi­cians are tak­ing, from the con­fines of the left to the extreme right, I have decid­ed to engage in this race towards the Élysée, by run­ning my can­di­da­cy for the 2022 pres­i­den­tial elec­tions” writes Nag­ib Azer­gui on Novem­ber 17 on his Twit­ter account to announce his can­di­da­cy for the next pres­i­den­tial elec­tion in France. A mes­sage accom­pa­nied by a video in which the founder of the UDMF explains his moti­va­tions. [Trans­lat­ed from French orig­i­nal using Google.]

Read the rest here.

In a state­ment on the UDMF web­site, par­ty leader Nag­ib Azuer­gi said he ran to save France from “sink­ing inex­orably into gen­er­al­ized decay,” laud­ing cit­i­zens who refused to “sink into fas­cism” and call­ing for call­ing on his fol­low­ers to sup­port his cam­paign. The UDMF also pub­lished a Youtube video announc­ing Azuergi’s candidacy.

Azer­gui co-found­ed the UDMF short­ly after the 2012 French Pres­i­den­tial Elec­tions, cit­ing the fail­ure of the Social­ist gov­ern­ment led by François Hol­lande to fight against the iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics “car­ried out for sev­er­al decades in France.” In the 2019 Euro­pean elec­tions, the par­ty was able to secure over 29,000 votes, most of them in the com­munes of Garges-lès-Gonesse and Mantes-la-Jolie in the Parisian sub­urbs. In 2015, it had won a seat on the munic­i­pal coun­cil of Bobigny, also locat­ed on the out­skirts of the French capital.

Although UDMF claims to be a non-denom­i­na­tion­al, sec­u­lar, and “deeply repub­li­can” move­ment, sev­er­al French politi­cians and jour­nal­ists have accused the par­ty of “com­mu­ni­tar­i­an­ism” and stok­ing divi­sions with­in French soci­ety. In ear­ly 2020, Bertrand Xavier, pres­i­dent of the Hauts-de-France region, accused the par­ty of try­ing to imple­ment gen­der seg­re­ga­tion in pub­lic baths and said they believed in the inequal­i­ty between men and women, to which the UDMF respond­ed by announc­ing a defama­tion law­suit against Xavier.

In a 2013 blog post on the par­ty’s web­site since delet­ed, UDMF called sec­u­lar­ism a “bar­ri­er to Islam,” which served as a “mod­el of absolute and per­fect­ly inco­her­ent intol­er­ance.” In April of the same year, a post on the UDMF blog, titled “Anti-Semi­tism, Islam­o­pho­bia: when (sic) His­to­ry repeats itself,” com­pared the satir­i­cal news­pa­per Char­lie Heb­do to anti-Semit­ic pub­li­ca­tions of the 1930s. In Novem­ber 2015, just days after the Islamist ter­ror­ist attacks on France, the UDMF cam­paigned against ris­ing Islam­o­pho­bia on the streets of Paris. The par­ty has also come out against the ban of the hijab in schools and cam­paigned on devel­op­ing Islam­ic finance as well as the French halal mar­ket. In its pro­gram, the UDMF pro­posed a law ban­ning the dis­sem­i­na­tion of hate speech against the Mus­lim com­mu­ni­ty, allow­ing the French Min­istry of the Inte­ri­or to “dis­solve all Islam­o­pho­bic asso­ci­a­tions or groups.”

The UDMF del­e­gate in Gen­nevil­liers, Abdel­ma­jid Aodel­la, stat­ed on his Face­book page that he was a grad­u­ate of the Insti­tut Européen des Sci­ences Humaines, a Mus­lim high­er edu­ca­tion facil­i­ty in rur­al France set up by the Coun­cil of Euro­pean Mus­lims and its French mem­ber Musul­mans de France, both orga­ni­za­tions rep­re­sent­ing the Glob­al Mus­lim Broth­er­hood (GMB) in Europe. Farid Omeir, head of the UDMF list in Cir­co Lyon Sud, has uploaded images sup­port­ive of the late Egypt­ian Mus­lim Broth­er­hood pres­i­dent Mohammed Mor­si to his Face­book profile.

The Glob­al Influ­ence Oper­a­tions Report (GIOR) has long cov­ered the activ­i­ties of Euro­pean polit­i­cal par­ties with ties to the GMB. This includes a Novem­ber 2021 report about the Dutch Mus­lim par­ty DENK, which intro­duced leg­is­la­tion allow­ing Utrecht munic­i­pal offi­cers and police aux­il­iaries to wear the hijab as part of their uni­form. In Novem­ber 2020, the GIOR was among the first to report that a par­lia­men­tary can­di­date for the Dutch Greens par­ty was like­ly the daugh­ter of one of the most impor­tant lead­ers of the GMB in the Netherlands.