Marine Tondelier, leader of France’s Green party, said the risk of the far right coming to power in France remained after the snap election and politics had to change quickly to regain voters’ trust.
“It was a warning,” Tondelier said of this month’s election, in which a spectacular surge in strategic voting in the final vote blunted the influence of Marine Le Pen’s far-right, anti-immigration Rally National party. Its first-round surge put the party closest to winning a parliamentary majority and joining the government.
“The republic has held on, but for how much longer?,” Tondelier said in an interview in his Paris office, days after his left-wing coalition, which includes the Greens, unexpectedly took the lead in elections.
As France holds talks on what type of government to form, Tondelier, a 37-year-old environmental activist, has been mentioned as a possible prime minister, but he has not commented on the prospect, saying policies are more important than people.
In the interview, she said it was crucial that France “do not continue with discriminatory public policies” that “destroy, weaken and undermine discrimination.” [society] If it does not continue for “another two years,” the far-right could make a new advance in the 2027 presidential election.
“There are a lot of people who want and need social justice, and we’re fighting for those people, and we’re fighting for them just the same whether they voted for us or not, or whether they didn’t vote at all,” she said.
Tondelier’s party, a broad-leaning left-wing coalition known as the New Popular Front, which includes Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s left-wing France Unbowed, the Socialists and the Communists, came in first but fell far short of an absolute majority. Tondelier posted on social media this week that Macron, who has insisted no political force won the election and has called for a broad coalition government, is refusing to accept the results. His refusal is “damaging the country and our democracy,” she said.
Tondelier, a regional lawmaker in northern France who became leader of the French Green Party (EELV) two years ago, rose from relative obscurity to prominence during the last election campaign.
Critics say she stood out for her passionate television performances, her humorous one-liners against far-right politicians and her trademark green jacket, which she started wearing as a subliminal way to raise environmental awareness but has since become a well-known brand in its own right. Social Media Accounts.
Tonderia’s heartfelt appeal resonated with left and center voters because her fight against the far right was deeply personal.
She was born, raised and still lives in Hénin-Beaumont, a former mining town in the northern Pas-de-Calais rust belt that has suffered factory closures and unemployment and transformed a decade ago from a left-wing heartland into a testing ground for Le Pen’s rise to power.
The Paris-born Le Pen was re-elected as the town’s member of parliament last week. But as a city councillor, Tondrier has battled the far-right in rowdy city council meetings since they won Hénin-Beaumont city council in 2014. She complains that the far-right hates her opponents so much that her microphone is cut in meetings and she is called a “hysteric” if she continues to talk. She wrote about this in her 2017 book. News from the Fronthas drawn the ire of the far right and reads like a manual for left-wing resistance.
Tonderia, who worked in air pollution control for five years, said her political training came from years confronting the far right at North Parliamentary meetings: “I learned everything in the face of their political custard pie. It was tough. I may have been mentally exhausted, but it actually made me better.”
So when the first round of voting on June 30th put the far-right in the lead in more than half of France and close to taking power, she immediately turned to strategic voting and withdrawing candidates to avoid splitting the vote. “I was 10 years ahead of everyone else. I saw experienced politicians getting stunned, in denial, getting angry, not knowing what to do, panicking, becoming defeatist, saying it was too late… But I remained very calm and determined.”
Photo: Yara Nardi/Reuters
Tonderia has already run in several elections, including local elections in 2015, to promote the strategic vote in northern regions to curb the far-right. “I know the political and human costs,” he said. Now he has become the media mouthpiece for the nationwide strategic vote campaign.
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Five generations of Tonderia’s family have been in the mining town, and she still lives there, raising her young son with her partner, who coaches the town’s triathlon club. One side of her family was a farmer; her great-grandmother ran a tobacco shop and was the area’s first female taxi driver. Her mother, a dentist, still practices in town, as does her father, an acupuncturist and osteopath.
Taking on bigger people has become Tondelier’s political trademark, her supporters say. She joined the Green party as a student in 2009, during the European election campaign, inspired by farmer Jose Bobé, whose protests a few years earlier had destroyed a McDonald’s that was half-built. “The fight between David and Goliath has always resonated with me,” she says.
She protested with other Green Party members at the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in 2009, and when she returned home she became a vegetarian for environmental reasons, realising that up until then she had only been eating meat as a polite gesture. She says that at the time, being a vegetarian was strange in the countryside in northern France, and when she told people she didn’t eat meat, they would often reply: “Don’t worry, we’ll give you ham instead.”
Tondelier believes one of the reasons the young far-right leader Jordan Bardella refused to debate her during the election campaign was because she had learned to use humour effectively against the far right in northern towns.
“If you yell, they yell, too,” she said. “It’s like playing mud with pigs. You practice and you get better, but you end up covered in mud because it’s their favorite sport.” Humor, on the other hand, upsets them, she said. “And humor is a way to try to stay happy and positive.”
Tondelier’s famous green jacket hangs in her office next to a supporter’s cap for Reims, the northern football club where she goes to watch games. She bought her first formal green jacket second-hand for €50, but had to buy a second one when it wore out during the campaign. She also has a casual denim green jacket for demonstrations and a green puffer for winter. “My idea was that since it’s hard to bring ecology into the conversation, if I wore the green jacket it would send a subliminal message… Now everyone wants that jacket because they’re more famous than me.”
Tondelier says humanism in politics is crucial, something she learned while working for a charity that helps street families on the north coast. During the 2015 local election campaign, she made regular drives to Calais’ vast slums, where up to 8,000 refugees and migrants live in squalid conditions. “I cried the whole way home, because I was ashamed,” she says. She feels that if every French person spent a day supporting migrant charities, it might change the way they think about politics.
When Tonderia gave birth to her son in December 2018, some people suggested that having a child might be a good excuse to quit campaigning and politics. But that weekend, the biggest Yellow vest The anti-government protests against fuel taxes coincided with major climate protests in France. “I saw all that happening and said of course we will continue. We have to protect biodiversity and the climate.”
