From ten to a hundred. On Tuesday May 10, a small communitarian Muslim political party, the Union des Démocrates Musulmans de France (UDMF), announced it would nominate one hundred candidates in the next parliamentary elections, Le Figaro reported. The UDMF was founded in 2012 by Nagib Azergui, a telecommunications engineer, and had fielded a dozen candidates for the 2017 parliamentary elections. Five years later, with these hundred candidacies, mainly concentrated in the strongholds of Muslim community elections (48 candidates in the Île-de-France region, 16 in Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes), the aim is to “make the movement permanent”.
On its campaign leaflet, the UDMF announces its position: A woman is depicted wearing a hijab, the Islamic veil. The party sees itself as openly Islamist and wants to make the “fight against Islamophobia and xenophobia” its priority. The movement had also nominated candidates for the 2019 European elections, the 2020 local elections and the 2021 regional elections. The UDMF is regularly denounced as an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist movement that is incidentally banned in numerous Muslim countries such as Egypt and Syria. Nagib Azergui had denounced that the Ministry of the Interior dissolved two associations in 2021, the Collectif contre l’Islamophobie en France (CCIF) and BarakaCity, both also close to the Brotherhood.