Jérôme Guedj regrets the word "bastard" but persists in believing that Jean-Luc Mélenchon is "anti-Semitic"

Jérôme Guedj takes partial responsibility. Two days after calling Jean-Luc Mélenchon an "anti-Semitic bastard," the Essonne MP says he "regrets" only half of his remarks. "I'm going to express one regret: that of having used the term 'bastard,' because it doesn't reflect my understanding of political debate," the Socialist Party spokesperson explained on BFMTV.

And he added: "It came like that in the heat of the moment and in the need to shake up where I saw a form of inertia emerging," explains the Socialist Party spokesperson. According to him, the association of the two terms is "a kind of pleonasm," "anti-Semitic was enough."

Socialist MP Jérôme Guedj, who broke with La France Insoumise after the Hamas attacks against Israel on October 7, 2023, made a frontal attack last Saturday, June 14.

"When I tell Jean-Luc Mélenchon that it is not possible or desirable to defend the claim of Palestine 'from the sea to the river,' I am defending the historical position of the socialists, notably that of François Mitterrand in the Knesset in 1982, which is that of the two-state solution, the security of Israel and the recognition of the Palestinian state. And at that moment, I become the genocidal Zionist for Jean-Luc Mélenchon and his followers," declared Jérôme Guedj from the podium of the Socialist Party congress in Nancy.

"I have a terrible heartbreak to tell this congress that, for the first time in my life, I had to say of the man I loved deeply that he has become an anti-Semitic bastard, with remarks that are absolutely unbearable for us," added the Essonne MP, to applause from the room.

In response, Jean-Luc Mélenchon demanded an apology from the Socialist Party on Sunday, failing which the party would have to "take responsibility." "I challenge Jérôme Guedj and anyone who applauded him to find in my writings or speeches a single time in the last forty years the expressions he attributes to me," the rebellious tribune wrote on X. "Does the Socialist Party apologize or take responsibility?"