When Marine Tondelier, the leader of the Greens, is told that she is sometimes called “the other Marine” of French politics, she hits back firmly. “No!” she says. “Le Pen is the other Marine.”
Given how rapidly Ms. Tondelier’s star has risen in recent months, her response is not outrageous. The French left has produced a new star in this garrulous, straight-talking ecologist who seems suddenly to appear on every TV and radio show and whose meadow-green jacket has become so iconic it has its own account on X.
Ms. Tondelier, 37, who was born in Hénin-Beaumont, a depressed northern town in the constituency of the far-right leader Marine Le Pen, was the driving force behind the creation of the New Popular Front, herding disparate parties into a left-wing alliance that won a surprise victory in parliamentary elections this month.
Less than two weeks later, the profoundly intractable new National Assembly of three large political blocs — left, center and nationalist right — gathers for the first time on Thursday. As it does, one question looms over a left-wing alliance that seems more fractured by the day: What to do with its about 190 seats in the 577-seat lower house when that is far short of an absolute majority?
President Emmanuel Macron has complicated that question further by making clear he has no intention of naming a left-wing prime minister. On Tuesday, he accepted the resignation of the centrist government of Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, but asked it to stay on in a caretaker capacity “for a certain period,” estimated at several weeks by some departing ministers, even into September.
That said, Mr. Macron demonstrated with the way he called a snap election that his political moves are entirely unpredictable.
The French Fifth Republic, established in 1958 with a powerful presidency conceived to curb parliamentary instability, had never previously been without a government for weeks or months on end, a situation familiar to countries like Germany, Italy and the Netherlands that have parliamentary systems.
In this sense, France has entered a new and unpredictable phase in its politics on the eve of the Paris Olympic Games, which open in eight days. Mr. Macron, who has sole power to name a prime minister, remains the “master of the clocks,” in the words of Philippe Labro, an author and political commentator. But nobody knows to what end he wants to deploy time, although his inclination seems to be to lean rightward rather than to the left.
“Our voters are screaming, ‘Do not betray us!’’’ Ms. Tondelier said in an interview last week in the modest headquarters of the Greens in the 10th District of Paris, an area once known principally for its two big train stations but which has, of late, acquired a hip reputation. “We have to be a government of combat, a government of action, of social justice,” she added. “It won’t be simple, easy, evident or comfortable, but we must make the effort.”
With her home and family in Hénin-Beaumont, she sleeps upstairs from the office in a makeshift bedroom. Her one condition for staying there — other options were too expensive — was that the shower worked. Her famous green jacket, a regular splash of color in gray political debates, hangs there.
“The natural ecosystem of the Greens is adversity,” she said with a smile, showing the small room.
Since that conversation, Ms. Tondelier’s words have been borne out as the parties of the alliance — the Greens, the Socialist Party, the Communist Party and the far-left France Unbowed of Jean-Luc Mélenchon — squabble. They have deadlocked over nominations for prime minister, taken to reciprocal insults, broken their promise of unity and generally floundered.
France Unbowed, whose pugnacious Mr. Mélenchon sees himself as the figurehead of the entire French left, has accused the Socialist Party of “vetoing any candidacy from the New Popular Front with the sole aim of imposing its own.” Olivier Faure, the Socialist leader, responded that he did not see “why the word of one should be imposed on all the others.”
All this has been too much for Ms. Tondelier, who by Wednesday was in an incandescent mood in an interview with the France 2 television network. “I am angry, disgusted and fed up,” she said. “And I feel desperate at the spectacle we are offering the French people.”
Every minute of the “ridiculous” internecine fights of the left only “won votes for the National Rally,” she said. She warned she would be unresponsive “when you come running to me looking for my green jacket in 2027 and say, ‘Help, we need a Republican front!’” — the traditional alliance of parties that has kept Ms. Le Pen and her far-right party from winning the presidency. Mr. Macron is term-limited and must leave office that year.
It is still conceivable that the New Popular Front will come together to nominate a possible prime minister. It did unite on Wednesday behind a candidate for the presidency of the National Assembly, André Chassaigne, a member of the Communist Party who has been a lawmaker for 22 years. That vote will take place on Thursday.
The left’s travails and divisions are nothing new. But for the seven million people who voted in the decisive second round of the election for the New Popular Front, the current disarray is dispiriting. Ten days ago, they danced in the streets. Their hopes were as varied as an improved minimum wage and protection for disappearing bird life in the French countryside.
“I know that the needed ecological transition can only happen with social justice in order for it to be acceptable,” Ms. Tondelier said. The Greens have suffered because, urged to buy electric cars, for example, many farmers and workers respond that they cannot afford them. “But we cannot escape the fact that for children born this year, nobody can guarantee that the planet will still be habitable when they turn 30.”
Ms. Tondelier grew up in Hénin-Beaumont, an area that never entirely recovered from the closure of its coal mines. It is still so environmentally afflicted that pregnant women are advised not to drink the tap water. Life spans are shorter there than in Paris. The many industries that replaced the mines also damaged the environment.
All of this affected Ms. Tondelier. “I come from a place where a lot of people were sick, and then I started hearing about the ozone layer and then the climate and then water and then pollution. And here I am.”
The child of a doctor and a dentist, she would vacation regularly with them in Vanoise National Park in the French Alps. There, she learned to love nature. “My 5-year-old son is there now with his grandparents and just saw his first chamois mountain goat and groundhog!” she said.
Ms. Tondelier also learned of the methods of Ms. Le Pen, who grew up in the affluent western Paris suburbs. Ms. Tondelier calls her “the vulture” because of the way she pounced on the region and chose it as her political base, seeing how hardship and poverty could lead many people to embrace the nationalist, anti-immigrant policies of a National Rally party promising a glorious future. Ms. Le Pen won 58 percent of the vote in the election’s first round, enough to be elected before going to the second-round runoff.
“The vulture is an opportunistic animal, and the National Rally is an opportunist party,” Ms. Tondelier said.
As for her green jacket, with its @VesteTondelier X account created by one of Ms. Tondelier’s fans, it has been a small counterpunch to the slick social media onslaught of the National Rally, particularly its young party leader, Jordan Bardella, 28, who has 1.9 million followers on TikTok. The green jacket has 15,000 X followers, and Ms. Tondelier herself has over 130,000.
Despite Mr. Bardella’s repeated boasts about his coaching in how to debate, “he did not dare debate with me,” she noted. “He’s a coward; he has no courage. All bark and no bite.”
In France, the arduousness or risk of a job may be factored into pensions. One National Rally lawmaker, Jean-Philippe Tanguy, did debate Ms. Tondelier and lived to regret it. He attacked her relentlessly, saying that “France will suffer again” if the left takes power. She shot back: “I suffer listening to you every single second, I can confirm that. In fact, I am going to add you to my hardship experiences for the purposes of my pension.”
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