At the beginning of the yellow vest movement, with her speech on the dignity of the poorest, she had become the embodiment of these single mothers struggling to survive despite their full-time jobs. Six years after the fall of 2018, Ingrid Levavasseur has long since hung up her fluorescent yellow vest. Now 37, she is no longer a nursing assistant but a seamstress, specializing in “upcycling”, she retouches clothes with fabric scraps from major brands.
“My clients include everything from workers to people who can afford to buy Jean Paul Gaultier,” she tells us. However, she still lives in rural Normandy, on the border between her native Seine-Maritime and her adopted Eure; this Sunday, July 7, the National Rally elected six deputies in these two departments. At the request of L’Express and in view of the political urgency, the former figure of the yellow vests agreed to come out of her media silence, which began in 2021. She has lost none of her bite.
L’Express: In 2018, you denounced the indifference of politicians towards poor workers but above the social assistance threshold. Six years later, despite the effectiveness of the Republican front, the National Rally is the leading party in the National Assembly. How did we get to this point?
Ingrid Levavasseur: I am very angry with Emmanuel Macron. He played the arsonist by promising great things, that he would revolutionize politics, then that he would listen to the French after the yellow vests, then that he would govern differently in the next presidential election. But he threw us away, he forgot us, he played with us. He showed so much disdain. Except that we don’t play. When I started demonstrating with the yellow vests, I no longer had enough to buy food despite my job. Did we win with the yellow vests? No, in the end, nothing changed, we were put back in our place.
But Emmanuel Macron made a mistake. He thought, as politicians often do, that people have a short memory. ‘Political memory is six months’, that’s a phrase I’ve heard several times. That doesn’t work anymore. Today, I talk to people who tell me ‘anyone but Macron’. It’s even a motivation: to inflict an affront on Macron.
This contempt of the government, or even of Paris as a whole, for ordinary French people is a feeling that is often heard in areas far from cities. How can we characterize it?
There is something that has always struck me: when zone C (which includes Paris) is on school holidays, the broadcasts, for example Dailyclose shop, there is no replacement program. We are entitled to reruns. We have the impression that when Paris goes on vacation, all of France must stop filming. It is anecdotal but symbolic of the way we feel things.
It’s like the low-emission zones (ZFE), where they want to stop us from driving certain vehicles. There’s one 5 kilometers from my house, while the nearest train station is twenty minutes away. There’s one shuttle per hour, that’s all. There’s no cycle path. What do we do? There are some hallucinations about the decisions taken in Paris. The pension reform was the same: of course, when you started working at 24, you understand more easily that you’re going to have to continue until you’re 67. But when, like me, you started at 15, you tell yourself that it’s deeply unfair to work longer.
You live in a department where the National Rally vote has exploded since 2022. How do you explain this?
The racist vote exists, these people who have always voted RN, I know that because I come from a family of ‘fascists’. But they are not the majority. The usual idea is: ‘We’re going to test’. It’s not the anchoring that counts, in my constituency, the RN candidate came from Essonne. The National Rally has managed to convince some people that with them, they will have more money. During the first round, for example, I heard a lady tell a young black man, in front of the polling station, that she was not voting Bardella out of racism, that it was purely for her wallet. They are wrong to think that the RN will change anything in their purchasing power. They are often people who are struggling, young people who can’t find a job after their BTS, single mothers who say: ‘The only ones who listen to us are the RN’. They think that after all, why not try.
Does the issue of immigration play an important role in this vote?
It depends. There are also young people who are not particularly politically aware, or who are not very politicized. They like Bardella, because he makes nice TikTok videos, because he is ‘cool’. Many of my daughter’s friends fit this description, some of them are from immigrant backgrounds.
Why don’t they vote more to the left?
The left, no one believes in it anymore, except perhaps to block it. They say ‘we’ve already tried, it’s always the same speeches and it doesn’t work’. The return of the ISF, for example, doesn’t give any particular hope. Because no one thinks that their life will change if the ISF is reinstated. There is even a detestation of the left, sometimes a hatred, which exists in parallel with the blockade against the RN.
During the inter-round election, François Ruffin proposed to rebuild the left around a new doctrine, to reconcile “the France of the towns” and “the France of the towers”. Do you believe it?
I believe in it in the sense that I never thought that we had to oppose the city and the rest, the elites, the bobos and the people, the France from above and the France from below. We need everyone, with different skills, different lives. Finding a soothing discourse, which brings everyone together, is urgent. A discourse which goes beyond the thought: ‘It’s so-and-so’s fault’. There are those who think that if they don’t eat, it’s the fault of immigrants, and those who think that if they don’t eat, it’s the fault of the rich. We have to find solutions for the most modest, by involving everyone. Reconciling the worker and the senior executive.
Today, there is talk of forming a government of “republican agreement”, with several of the parties opposed to the RN. Could we imagine that this coalition could cause a surge?
No. My feeling, and the majority feeling, I believe, is that nothing will produce this electroshock. Even the RN in government, I am sure that Emmanuel Macron would use it to say: ‘Look, it doesn’t work, we have to go back to the original Macronism’. The parties are not equipped to change software. We would have to change the profiles in power, change the paths that allow people to get to power, change access to the paths that allow people to get to power.
France has accumulated more than 3,000 billion euros of debts. Do you understand that some political leaders believe that the French are living beyond their means and that collective efforts must be made?
I am not a specialist in figures, I admit it without problem, I am not the best placed to give lessons in economics. But I am convinced of one thing, which some serious economists say better than me: wealth exists. I remember a conversation with Marlène Schiappa, who was a minister, at the time of the yellow vests: I realized that we did not have absolutely the same vision of what it means to be rich. I thought that living on 1,800 euros was already great. She told me that for some, being rich was not enough… My conviction is that we must get away from the idea that there is no alternative to impoverishing people. We must find and develop alternatives.
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