“So that the fight against cancer is not a rosy veneer”: LFI MP Mathilde Panot creates controversy by attacking the Pink October campaign

A ribbon banned by the boss of the deputies of La France insoumise. Mathilde Panot demonstrates her refusal to wear the symbol of the Pink October campaign, in a video published Friday October 9 on several social networks, which has already accumulated more than a million views on

Pink October is an annual global campaign to communicate and raise awareness about breast cancer screening, and to raise funds for research. This event is symbolized by a small pink ribbon, which many personalities wear throughout the month of October. In her video, Mathilde Panot first recalls the importance of fighting against breast cancer, “the deadliest among women”.

A pesticide industrialist singled out

But she points out the “absolute cynicism” behind Pink October. This initiative, she claims, was "started in the mid-1980s" by Industrial Chemical Industries (ICI), a company that produced both pesticides and cancer treatments. “They sell the poison that makes you sick and they then sell the treatment for the same illness,” denounces Mathilde Panot, who argues that the company wanted to promote screening “to expand its market”.

If breast cancer awareness month was launched in 1985 by a partnership between ICI and the American Cancer Society, the pink ribbon appeared in 1992, at the initiative of a cosmetics company, Estée Lauder, and an American magazine, specifies the Pink Ribbon association. Pink October and its ribbon arrived in France in 1994, at the initiative of Estée Lauder France and the Marie Claire press group.

The LFI MP also underlines the historic link between ICI and Syngenta, a multinational today the market leader in phytosanitary products, which results from the merger of the branches of the companies AstraZeneca (born from the merger of Zeneca, owned by ICI) and Novartis. “Syngenta is also its Israeli subsidiary, Adama, which produces generic pesticides. Syngenta is therefore closely linked to Israel's colonial expansion project, which massively spreads pesticides to destroy Palestinian and Lebanese lands,” she says.

“These people are hypocrites”

Mathilde Panot also puts forward another reason to reject the awareness campaign: "In the National Assembly, the macronie, the right and the extreme right are beating each other's throats" while they voted for the reintroduction of "two pesticides which directly attack the brains of children", she attacks, in reference to the agricultural emergency law. “These people are hypocrites,” she continues, making a link between the use of pesticides in agriculture and cases of cancer.

“So that the fight against cancer is not a rosy varnish once a year, we do not want a rosy October but an angry October,” she concludes, in a nod to the Anger Cancer movement, which she cites among the initiators of recent demonstrations against pesticides. The MP also underlines that, during its parliamentary session on October 29 in the Assembly, the LFI group will present a text to once again ban the two controversial pesticides, acetamiprid and flupyradifurone.

An “indecent staging”

His position sparked strong reactions within the political class and the government. “Are you never ashamed?”, replied Aurore Bergé, the minister in charge of Equality between women and men, on “This obsession, behind which there is an increasingly unapologetic anti-Semitism – and which insoumise France also considers 'residual' – will deceive no one,” continues the National Rally presidential candidate.

“As a deputy, as a former Minister of Health but firstly as a patient, I find this staging indecent,” also reacted Aurélien Rousseau, former minister in the government of Elisabeth Borne, now a related deputy of the socialist group and member of Place publique.