Daniel Cohn-Bendit addresses the migration crisis in Mayotte, shocking the left. In a debate with former Education Minister Luc Ferry on LCI on Sunday January 5, the former student leader of May 68 referred to the ‘exceptional’ migration situation on the Indian Ocean archipelago, which was devastated by Cyclone Chido just over a fortnight ago, claiming at least 39 lives. While Daniel Cohn-Bendit fought against this type of hypothesis until recently, he adopted the discourse of part of the right on Mayotte, which called for ‘slowing down and making impossible this immigration, which leads to a great upheaval, a great exchange of populations’. For him, the overseas territory is no longer France: ‘You can’t discuss the problem ideologically, you have to see Mayotte, it’s not France, you can’t confuse it.’
He also referred to the recent article published in Le Figaro by the three ministers Bruno Retailleau, Manuel Valls and Sébastien Lecornu, in which they call for a ‘firm hand on migration’, otherwise ‘Mayotte will be rebuilt as a sort of sanctuary’. ‘If it is effective, it is a bulwark’, says Daniel Cohn-Bendit.
The 68-year-old’s comments triggered an outcry on the left. Green MP Sandrine Rousseau wrote on the social network X: ‘Shame on you, Dany’. For her part, Sarah Legrain, a member of the La France insoumise (LFI) party, referred to the concept of the great replacement, a theory by Renaud Camus: ‘Cohn-Bendit is calmly adopting the concept of the “great replacement” for himself. But he will probably soon be giving us lessons on how best to defeat the far right in the next elections.’ Finally, her colleague from the LFI, Arnaud Saint-Martin, judged that Daniel Cohn-Bendit was a ‘’68 boomer on the road to fascist radicalisation’.