Leaning in the dining car of a TGV heading west, a Europe Ecologie – Les Verts executive sips his hot tea with difficulty while taking bets. We are at the end of November 2022, a few days before the first round of the EELV congress. And he, a connoisseur of green mysteries, swears to know the outcome. Marine Tondelier will win, followed by Sophie Buissière, Yannick Jadot’s envoy. Sandrine Rousseau, represented by Mélissa Camara, will be, he says, “swept away”. A defeat, he even hopes, which will sign “the beginning of his end”.
You could call him a visionary, as he was right about the order of arrival. The list of Bussière barely exceeded 18% when that of Camara collected only 13.54% of the votes of the members. A heavy setback for the last two finalists of the green primary, and probably even more bitter for Sandrine Rousseau. She believed for a long time that she could recover this party in lack of energy, thinking that those who had mobilized for her during the environmentalist primary of September 2021 – non-members for the most part – would join the movement to make it switch to her favor. A failure. At the EELV congress, an “everything except Rousseau” had his skin.
Cleave to exist
What will remain of Sandrine Rousseau in 2023? Nothing less than in 2022. She has not said her last word, and has made her own an old socialist precept that an old white male – François Mitterrand – advocated a long time ago. “The worst mistake is not in failure but in the inability to overcome failure,” he said. “I remember when Sandrine showed up for the primary, many said she would be a new candidate for the wooden tie [NDLR : Henri Stoll, candidat à la primaire en 2011, portait une cravate en bois et a réalisé le pire score de l’histoire du parti]. And everyone was wrong”, recounts Mélissa Camara, elected Lille and close to the ecofeminist.
In the first steps of the Nupes in the corridors of the National Assembly, while her ecologist comrades, lethargic, find it difficult to settle down and make their voices heard, Sandrine Rousseau, she imposes herself, seizing all possible opportunities to speak in the hemicycle, as well as outside. From the summer, it punctuates the media agenda of the new left alliance with a debate on meat and barbecue, then another on the right to laziness. She even imposes a duel, to the great displeasure of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, between her and the communist Fabien Roussel. Two faces, two lines… And tensions.
Sandrine Rousseau cleaves. So does it exist. So she will continue to do so. For a time, the rebels thought he was closer to them than to environmentalists. They took it badly. When the Adrien Quatennens affair broke out, she did not hesitate to send Mélenchon back to the ropes when he published a tweet of support for his foal. When the lieutenants of Mélenchon prepare the return of Quatennens, she goes to the front – media – and asks that the deputy give up his seat. From now on, Mélenchon is wary of it, especially since he sees that many of his rebellious flock have taken the side of the ecofeminist, quietly calling for the resignation of Adrien Quatennens.
“From Ruffin to feminist sauce”
Olivier Faure, Fabien Roussel, Jean-Luc Mélenchon… These would like to put an end to the controversies of all kinds, often maintained by Sandrine Rousseau, as well as to the embarrassing affairs that were the Quatennens affair or that targeting Julien Bayou. “Peripheral subjects”, says one of them, which pollute the way forward, and in particular the battle for pensions. “We must return to the fundamentals of the left, talk about wages, more social than societal, less Rousseau more prolo”, says a socialist. Around Sandrine Rousseau, we pout in the face of this observation.
The ecologist wants to continue to strike the societal iron as long as it is still hot. “I like the little list of things that would not be real fights on the left: right to laziness, the Bayou and Quatennens affairs, barbecues… Talking about these subjects does not in any way prevent you from being on the bridge of more classic social struggles. You have to know how to do everything at once”, explains a faithful of the Green MP. She refuses to become, like other of her comrades, one more notable on the left, at a time when environmental activists are radicalizing and turning their backs on politics. She, on the other hand, dreams of becoming a receptacle for this anger.
In 2022, with two consecutive setbacks, a presidential campaign from which she was excluded and so many criticisms from her own comrades, Sandrine Rousseau could have been brooding. It did not happen. The lost primary? Behind her. The defeat of Congress? Anecdotal. The conquest of power has never been his battle, nor in his DNA. “Her cam is agit-prop. Which is rather funny when you know that she was originally an apparatchik, smiles someone close to Jadot. Today she makes Ruffin with feminist sauce and business seems to be going pretty well for her.” In 2023, it is a safe bet that Sandrine Rousseau will remain Sandrine Rousseau.