Another Marine who brings order to the Left (and in Palace Mystery dreams of being Prime Minister)

They compare her to the United Nations, in the heterogeneous front of the French left: so much so that she has earned the nickname “the blue helmet”. The woman who brings peace between the men in conflict. And between parties with very different DNA from each other, in terms of foreign policy and the economy in particular, they have done nothing in front of the Cartesian camera except delegitimize each other’s leaders for at least twenty days. And not you, you attack the “extreme right” and criticize the president’s team, but without putting it on the same level as your first opponent, the National Rally. She is “the other marine”, as they call her in the fiefdom of Hénin-Beaumont, in northern France, where she lives 200 meters from the town hall. She is 37 years old, a militant ecologist and has learned the hard way how to play politics: you have to put your face forward, occupy the spaces left empty by others, and press the accelerator when the time is right; even in a dangerous curve like this second round.

For a few days, Marine Tondelaer has in fact abandoned her proverbial esteem, even on social media: from small TV shows to recurring TV shows. From a mere dividing line between the far left and the Socialist Party, to the de facto leader of the new Popular Front. After her long duel with Bardella and Attal on BfmTv, she is now for the militants the driving force of the coalition. A spark in Mélenchon’s pile of communists, socialists, greens and far leftists. Certain parts of that Republican Front that the outgoing Prime Minister Attal imagines also look at her with curiosity.

“I will not participate in the self-candidacy parade…”, he says with false modesty, concealing confidence in a system ready to find emergency solutions at a time when the Elysée has lost its ability to cope with the Macron shock. From an enforcement force to an intervention force? Possible. Like the blue helmets in crisis zones, the Tondeleer card is showing. “The priority is to beat Bardella, we will always find solutions.” As in 2022, when she ran for the post of secretary of Eelv (Europe Écologie Les Verts) she beat the favourite Julien Baillot, and today she is ready to enter the enigma of youth in government.

With an additional weapon. She is a woman, a mother in civil union with her vegetarian partner (since 2009). For about ten years, she has been fighting the Libérations in her homeland as a municipal councillor in the Pas-de-Calais region, the electoral stronghold of the National Front. She has not been shy about competing, but in her own way: “It is a difficult and heartbreaking battle, I live 200 metres from the town hall…”. Almost monochrome, Le Pen holds meetings and sometimes press conferences; in which the right has begun to get its message across. Meanwhile, she is getting her university degree from the University of Sciences Po Lille, positioning herself halfway between the field and the academy, between the state and the revolution; she has had experience in public assistance in Parisian hospitals and in politics as spokesman for the presidential campaign of the Green Party Yannick Jadot, and before that as the right-hand man of Cécile de Flot, the ecologist who was already a minister in the past. Who is no longer there.

Today, he sees young people moving towards ideologies pushed to the extreme to defend the environment (and deface monuments). It is open to discussion with everyone. But “there will be no macaroni at Matignon.”

He also boasts of lapses in honor. After claiming he doesn’t fly, he says he goes to Guyana every year to watch a tree grow. “Did he swim there?” jokes RN. He gets away with it like this: I only travel for work.