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Muslim-Focused Party to Field 50 Candidates in French Municipal Elections
Tuesday 22 October 2019, by
In a socio-political climate where the Muslim community is stigmatized in France, the Union of French Muslim Democrats (UDMF) is not giving up. On the contrary, despite the accusations of "communitarianism" that it faces, the party, which boasts of its non-negligible score in the European elections, plans to present around fifty candidates in the municipal elections next March.
To all those voices rising up to ban "community lists", Nagib Azergui gives a straightforward answer: "the UDMF is not one".
The President of the Union of French Muslim Democrats (UDMF), on the microphone of BFMTV, acknowledges that his "political force" must "work on the fact of integrating a whole part of the national community that has been much discriminated against in recent years", namely the Muslims.
In an increasingly Islamophobic climate, the challenge facing the party is great: "Many people are bugging with the word Muslim," Nagib Azergui confided to BFMTV, without admitting defeat. His party, which currently claims 900 members, describes itself as "non-denominational, secular and deeply republican".
Already, in the European elections last May, the UDMF obtained the trust of 29,000 voters, or 0.13% of the votes cast.
Some local advances have allowed the party to strengthen its base, with, in particular, 7.43% of the vote in Garges-lès-Gonesse (Val-d’Oise), 6.77% in Mantes-la-Jolie (Yvelines) and up to 40% in a polling station in Maubeuge (Nord).
Scores that, according to experts, compare the party to a "micro-phenomenon", reports the same source.
"The problem is that the word ’Muslim’ now refers to the prism of communitarianism, danger, sectarianism. We talk a lot about wanting to censor the UDMF without giving us the opportunity to express ourselves on this subject," laments Nagib Azergui.
It was in 2012 that the UDMF was born in the hope of wanting to "make the silent majority of Muslims speak", Kamal Moumni, the party’s first candidate in the 2014 municipal elections, told Le Parisien.