Breast cancer screening: Mathilde Panot refuses to wear the Pink October ribbon, anger of ministers and the RN

The breast cancer screening awareness campaign is turning into a political game. Mathilde Panot attracted strong criticism after announcing on Saturday that she would not wear the Pink October ribbon.

“I will not wear the Pink October ribbon,” she says in a video posted on X, emphasizing that “France is the second country in the world most affected by breast cancer.”

Criticism of “macronie, the right and the extreme right”

To justify herself, the LFI MP believes that “when we scratch the pink varnish, we discover absolute cynicism”. She assures that the campaign that became Pink October was launched in the mid-1980s by Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI), a company which then sold “the poison that makes you sick” and “then the treatment for that same disease”. She also describes as “hypocrites” “the macronie, the right and the extreme right” who “pin their chests rosy”.

These comments sparked a strong reaction from the Minister of Health Stéphanie Rist, who said on X that “the fight against breast cancer deserves better than scientific approximations and political controversies”. “Aren’t you ever ashamed? » for her part launched the Minister of Gender Equality Aurore Bergé, while the High Commissioner for Children Sarah El Haïry assured that “the Pink Ribbon has existed in France since 1994, well before Macron”

“Breast Cancer Awareness Month” was launched in 1985 in the United States, and according to the Pink Ribbon association, the history of the ribbon itself began there in 1992, at the initiative of the cosmetics company Estée Lauder and Self magazine.

Panot attacks “Israel’s colonial expansion”

In her video, Mathilde Panot underlines the link which led, via several mergers, a branch of ICI to the pesticide manufacturer Syngenta, and she considers that the latter is “closely linked to Israel’s colonial expansion project” via its subsidiary Adama which produces “generic pesticides” there.

Our articles on the Pink October campaign

“Mathilde Panot refuses to wear the pink ribbon […] because she sees it as a link with Israel. This obsession, behind which there is an increasingly assertive anti-Semitism […] will not deceive anyone,” responded RN leader Marine Le Pen.