When she was younger, Marie Toussaint used to visit her father in the Paris region on weekends. Jean Toussaint remembers one of those times when, on his daughter’s face, he read resentment. “You always told me to be kind, to make sure to look out for everyone… But that’s not life! You raised me badly,” the young woman called out to him. At the time, the woman who is now the Ecologists candidate in the next European elections was 25 years old. And has been active in the party for seven years. “For a long time I aroused the incomprehension of my classmates. They thought that being a little care bear was a strategy in itself,” she says now. The years have passed and the leather has thickened, she assures us. The message remains similar. It has even become politicized: “We must oppose this slippery slope of generalized violence with the horizon of gentleness.” In communication strategy, a subject in which she graduated, we call it “personal branding”: she will put it to the test this Saturday, December 2 in the evening, for her launch meeting at the Elysée Montmartre, in Paris.
The adventure still risks being violent, in an election resembling a mid-term vote, and against a backdrop of tensions between ex-partners of Nupes. “I proposed a non-aggression pact to the Rebels… And I received contemptuous silence,” she breathes. Marie Toussaint had already tasted the preludes of what could be the debates to come. Last August, at the summer universities of La France insoumise, the green European parliamentarian was whistled by activists. Was it a trap set by the Mélenchonists? Whatever. “The boos, I take them with a smile because I want to respond to them with love,” she retorted at the time. Naivety? “I knew where I was going anyway, it’s politics,” she says today. Lucidity.
Turban, baggy pants and teasing
Marie Toussaint is an ATD Fourth World baby. His parents, permanent volunteers of the association to fight against poverty, also met there. And have chosen to live among the most disadvantaged. She follows them, from the Wazemmes district in Lille, to the city of Aubiers in Bordeaux, via Méry-sur-Oise. “We involved her in a life shared with people in difficulty,” explains Jean Toussaint. At Sciences Po, which she joined after high school via a priority education agreement, the culture shock was difficult to deal with. “I saw difficult things, but malevolence was foreign to me. I partly discovered it there,” she explains.
“She had the turban, the big scarf, the baggy pants. We made fun of her a little, asking her if she had listened to the latest Manu Chao album, remembers the screenwriter Baptiste Fillon, her friend at the time . She had this teddy bear side, but when she talked about politics, she went frankly. I was still surprised that she climbed into the organization of a party: it requires a lot of compromises, whereas she is rather whole.” The dinners of his group of friends, in the living room of his parents’ apartment, in the 17th arrondissement of Paris, are sometimes the receptacle of the current European political scene. With her former friend Mathilde Androuët, MEP from the National Rally, she fights over fair trade food and clothing. “Marie is someone who is industrious and methodical: she is reassured by that. But I don’t think she is adapted to the violence and exaltation that being the head of the list imposes,” analyzes the latter. The two former friends now ignore each other, in Brussels and Strasbourg.
Still unknown to the general public, Marie Toussaint has nevertheless established herself in the activist landscape thanks to “The Affair of the Century”. In 2019, its environmental rights NGO Our Business to All, as well as three other associations (Oxfam, Greenpeace, and the Foundation for Nature and Man) took the State to court and ordered it to respect its commitments. in favor of the climate. More than two million citizens signed a petition in this direction. Two years later, the Paris administrative court recognized the State’s fault. “I realize that, in this story, I applied the same logic that I observed at ATD Fourth World: we cannot be content with being charitable, for nature as well as for people “We must instead provide tools to allow people and nature to defend themselves,” she swears.
“The overhang strategy works when you’re known!”
From the commitment of her people, she also retains the importance of the social struggle in the environmental fight, a failure that is often attributed to the party. In 2020, with Priscillia Ludosky, one of the figures of the Yellow Vests, she published “Together we demand justice” (Editions Massot). “We want to connect the fights. Because the powerful have always destroyed the planet while destroying our lives,” they write. Marie Toussaint embodies a much more left-wing line than Yannick Jadot, her predecessor. She proposes, among other things, to establish a right of social veto for a public policy if the latter worsens the conditions of the poorest classes.
When questioned, Marie Toussaint takes long pauses before answering the questions. Within her political party, some would like to see her get a little more wet, and come out of her discretion. “I don’t know what the media’s assessment of it is, but I have one: it’s a nobody, loads a party oil. Now is the time to tell things, to invite ourselves into national debates. The overhang strategy works when you are known! At the time of the Hamas attack, she tweeted two days later!” Faced with the ordeal that awaits her, Marie Toussaint remains stoic. “You shouldn’t be stressed. We must understand our responsibility.” In private, she is sometimes doubtful. “She is aware that the atmosphere is not buoyant, that environmentalists are at risk of declining. She really didn’t get on a horse thinking that it was going to be peaceful,” observes one of her close friends. Wisdom and gentleness: is this a political project?
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