The French Green leader, Marine Tondelier, has said the risk of the far right rising to power in France has not disappeared after the snap election, and politics must urgently change to regain voters’ trust.
“It was a warning,” Tondelier said of this month’s election, where a spectacular rush of tactical voting in the final round held back Marine Le Pen’s far-right, anti-immigration National Rally. The RN’s first-round surge had brought it the closest it had ever been to a parliament majority and entering government.
“The Republic held on, but for how much longer?” Tondelier said in an interview in her Paris office, days after a left alliance including her Green party finished ahead in the election in a surprise result.
Talks are now under way over what type of government France could form and Tondelier, a 37-year-old environmentalist, is among names being suggested for prime minister – a prospect she has not commented on, saying policy is more important than personalities.
In the interview, she said it was crucial that France “does not continue the same discriminatory public policies that break, exhaust and damage [society] for another two years” or there could be a fresh surge by the far right in the presidential election of 2027.
“There are a lot of people who want and need social justice and we are fighting for those people. Whether or not they voted for us, or didn’t vote at all, we’ll fight for them all the same,” she said.
The broad left alliance known as the New Popular Front – which includes Tondelier’s party, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s leftwing France Unbowed, the Socialists and Communists – finished first but fell far short of an absolute majority. Tondelier wrote on social media this week that Macron – who has insisted that no one political force won the election and called for a broad coalition – was refusing to accept the election results. She said his denial was “damaging the country and democracy”.
Tondelier, a local councillor from northern France who took over the French Green party (EELV) two years ago, went from a relative unknown to a household name during the snap election campaign.
Commentators said she stood out for her impassioned TV appearances, humorous one-liner put-downs of far-right politicians and her trademark green jacket, which she started wearing as a subliminal way of raising awareness of environmental issues but which now carries such brand recognition that it has its own social media account.
If Tondelier’s heartfelt pleas won over voters on the left and centre, it was because her battle with the far right is deeply personal.
She was born, grew up and still lives in the former coal-mining town of Hénin-Beaumont in the northern rust belt of the Pas-de-Calais. Its population of 27,000 has suffered from factory closures and unemployment, and a decade ago the town went from being a leftwing heartland to Le Pen’s laboratory for gaining power.
Paris-born Le Pen was re-elected as MP for the town last week. But since the far right won Hénin-Beaumont town hall in 2014, Tondelier as a local councillor has fought them in rowdy council meetings. She has complained that the far right so resented opposition that her mic was switched off in meetings where they called her “hysterical” when she kept speaking. She wrote about it in a 2017 book, News from the Front, which caused fury on the far right and reads like a manual for the left’s resistance.
Tondelier, who for five years worked in air quality control, says the years spent facing the far right in northern council meetings was her political training. “I’ve learned everything through getting their political custard pies in my face. It was harsh. It could have made me crack, but actually it’s built me.”
So when the first-round election results on 30 June saw the far right top the poll across more than half of France and come within reach of power, she immediately began working on tactical voting and candidates pulling out to avoid splitting the vote. “I was 10 years ahead of everyone else’s anxiety. I saw very experienced politicians stupefied, in denial or anger, not knowing what to do, panicking, defeatist or saying it was too late … but I was very calm and determined.”
Photograph: Yara Nardi/Reuters
Tondelier had herself already stood aside in several elections to facilitate tactical voting to hold back the far right in her northern area, including the 2015 regional elections. “I know the political and human cost of it,” she said. This time, she became the media voice of the huge tactical voting drive nationwide.
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Five generations of Tondelier’s family come from the mining town where she still lives and raises her young son with her partner, who coaches the town’s triathlon club. One side of the family were farmers. Her great-grandmother ran a tobacconist’s and became the first female taxi driver in the area. Her mother, a dentist, still practises in the town, as does her father, an acupuncturist and osteopath.
Taking on people bigger than herself has become Tondelier’s political trademark, her supporters say. She joined the Greens as a student in 2009 during the European election campaign by the farmer José Bové, impressed that years earlier he had trashed a half-built McDonald’s in a protest campaign. “The David versus Goliath struggle has always spoken to me,” she said.
She went with other Greens to protest at the UN climate change conference in Copenhagen in 2009, and when she returned she became vegetarian for environmental reasons, realising she had only been eating meat to be polite. In rural, northern France, it was bizarre to be a vegetarian at that time, she said. When she told people she didn’t eat meat, she would often hear: “Don’t worry love, we’ll give you ham instead.”
Tondelier thinks one of the reasons the young far-right leader Jordan Bardella refused to debate her during the election campaign was because in her northern town she had learned to use humour effectively against the far right.
She said: “If you shout, they shout. It’s like a mudfight with a pig: you can train and make progress but it’s their favourite sport so you’re going to end up dirty and in the mud.” Humour, on the other hand, destabilised them, she said. “And it’s a way to try to stay happy and positive.”
Tondelier’s famous green jacket hangs in her office beside her supporter’s cap for the northern football club Lens, where she goes to games. She bought her first formal green jacket secondhand for €50 and had to buy a second one during the campaign when it was getting threadbare. She also has a casual denim green jacket for demos and a green puffa for winter. “My idea was that it’s hard to bring ecology into the conversation, so if I wore a green jacket it would be a subliminal message … Now everyone’s asking for the jacket, it’s more famous than I am.”
Tondelier says humanism in politics is crucial, and she learned this from helping charities who work with families sleeping rough on the northern coast. During the 2015 regional election campaign, she regularly drove up to Calais to the vast shantytown where up to 8,000 refugees and migrants were living in squalid conditions. “I used to cry the whole way home from shame,” she said. She feels that if all French people spent a day helping charities working with migrants, they might change their mind about politics.
When Tondelier had her son in December 2018, some told her that if she wanted to quit campaigning and politics, parenthood could be an honourable excuse. That weekend, however, the biggest gilets jaunes anti-government protests over fuel tax took place at the same time as France’s major climate march. “I saw that all happening and I said of course we’ll carry on. We’ve got to save biodiversity and the climate.”