She is a maid in a hotel, of Ivorian origin, and has just entered the National Assembly. At 48, Rachel Keke was elected deputy for Nupes in the 7th constituency of Val de Marne. She even offers herself the luxury of having beaten the former Minister of Sports Roxana Maracineanu in the second round. Very moved, Rachel Keke took her first steps at the Bourbon Palace this Tuesday, June 21 with a message: everything is possible.
Surrounded by dozens of cameras, it is while zoukant that Rachel Keke arrives at the Assembly. ” When you win, you have to express yourself in the dance “, she says.
Arrived in France after the 1999 military coup in Côte d’Ivoire, Rachel Keke had never entered the National Assembly. ” It’s really historic. she confides, it’s a message in fact, to tell people, even if you don’t know how to express yourself, if you can’t read and write, that you have intelligence, you can be an MP. »
Of course, Rachel Keke, maid, still has to discover the mysteries of the Assembly. When asked, for example, in which Commission she would like to sit, she replies that she does not know. What she does know, however, is that she will very quickly go and discuss with the cleaning ladies of the National Assembly: “ I want to see if they work in better conditions, we cannot accept that where laws are decided, women who clean there are looked down upon. »
► To read also: Rachel Keke, a former chambermaid at the Assembly
At the bend of an alley Rachel Keke meets the rebellious deputy François Ruffin. ” It should be normal that there are maids, he says, that there are maintenance workers who enter this hemicycle and impose a form of social parity, just as we imposed gender parity. »
First housekeeper to sit in the Assembly, Rachel Keke dedicated this victory to her colleagues at the Ibis Batignolles hotel, for whom she had fought for 22 months to obtain better working conditions.