Sandrine Rousseau, candidate for the ecological primary which takes place from September 16 to 19, 2021 is considered the most radical. His line disturbs even in his camp. aufeminin was able to meet her.
Can we speak of a Sandrine Rousseau phenomenon? The answer will fall this Sunday, September 19, at the same time as the results of an EELV primary which sees her face Delphine Batho, Jean-Marc Governatori, Yannick Jadot and Eric Piolle. Whether or not she is elected green candidate for the 2022 presidential election (at the beginning of September, a controversial poll gave Yannick Jadot the winner), Sandrine Rousseau will at least have succeeded in provoking several substantive discussions, ranging from ecofeminism, which she claims to be, in place of women in the forum, by not passing whiteness in the dominant ecological discourse.
A challenge at a time when the political debate seems reduced to fact-checking Zemourrian excesses… His method? Expose a solid discourse – economist by training, she is vice-president of the University of Lille – but also divisive – feminist on the radical side of the force, it is in 2016 that she denounces the sexual assaults committed by Denis Beaupin, before committing to the issue of menstrual insecurity in 2019.
While the French political class chooses to take the course very to the right – security and immigration are announced as major themes of the presidential campaign, including within theleftmost – So Sandrine Rousseau is currently sailing against the grain. A necessarily losing choice? Not for the candidate for the primary, who believes on the contrary to go in the direction of history. She explains it to aufeminin.
Why so much turmoil over your candidacy, including at the top of the state?
If we take the sequence with Gérald Darmanin, who threatens to reveal SMS exchanges, it is intimidation, a mode of violent exercise of power.
At the time, Darmanin blocked my appointment [à la tête de l’Institut régional d’administration de Lille, NDLR] and it was not the first time, he had already done it at Sciences Po Lille. For me, it is abuse of a dominant position, which is not politically ethical. My candidacy also involves another way of doing politics and another relationship to power, where we don’t go looking for it to use it, or even abuse it, but we go there to do things and change people’s lives. It’s radically different in approach.
Would you play some kind of scarecrow in politics?
I’m a woman, slender, I have gray hair, something we’ve never seen before. My very body, in this presidential election, confronts people with their contradictions and their practices of power. My whole person says that I will not pull over and discipline myself, even in appearance. And all of these “weak signals” confront them with the fact that they have never yet considered a truly free and independent woman who takes power. We see that Darmanin, direct, he slips. The presence of a woman who claims not to depend on men makes them slip.
You are also accused of amateurism. How do you respond to your detractors?
I claim the right to make mistakes and also to have sensitivity in politics. For example, this tweet with an error on Jean-Paul Belmondo, he was on the web for five minutes. I immediately corrected it. However, there have been thousands of mocking screenshots circulating. And next to it, there are presidential candidates who have been in custody, the president who was wrong about the geographical location of Guyana, much more serious things.
I therefore claim the right to make mistakes but also the spontaneity of my speech, which is not composed only of elements of language, prepared by professionals of politics. All this gives a disembodied language. I also assume a form of sensitivity in politics. I am the only one to have cried on television, to have tears in my eyes on certain subjects. But ultimately, politics is also sensitive, we must have a link to nature, to the most vulnerable …
If we are not in empathy, we have no reason to conduct policies for others.
On a purely political level, what measures are you defending in the context of the 2022 presidential election?
First, the ecological transformation, which will be difficult because we have 5 years to make major changes. If we’re there just to secure a political career, we’re going to miss the point. My first measurement? The minimum living income. If we want to propose a major ecological transformation, we must tell people that they are not going to be impoverished, reassure that they will not be in a worse situation than those in which they are today. Obviously, we must assume that some people will have to change their lifestyle, change jobs, but for the most precarious, we must show that they are protected.
Then, we need strong measures in terms of the environment: stop theartificialization [des milieux naturels, NDLR] and make a great health / environment plan. There are a lot of people who are sick with pollution today and it is not recognized at all. These are measures that we are talking about but where things are not moving. On the artificialization of agricultural land, for example, there is really an inability to leave the model as we know it. For example, we are going to concrete century-old workers’ gardens of Aubervilliers, while these are green lungs for this city, and we are unable to say to ourselves that in the long term, gardens are much more important.
During the Covid crisis, what we missed the most is access to nature, to gardens. Coming out of the Covid, you really have to ask yourself what is essential and what is not. But we did the opposite of what we should have done: we closed the schools, we closed the parks (when we could have managed to create niches of nature, for example), we closed places of culture. And we left the hypermarkets open instead. Access to nature is not considered a right, nor access to health … I have been referred a lot to the controversy over community health [le fait que des personnes préfèrent aller chez des médecins racisé.e.s pour échapper à certains biais racistes de la médecine, NDLR], corn in fine, what is most important? It is that people take care of themselves.
What new company are you calling for?
There is a social movement that is in the process of being played out, between very virilist candidacies, which deny the environment and are identity folds, and another project which is about inclusion, respect. In ecology, what we denounce is the idea that we use nature by taking resources and then throwing them away. This is what pollutes and leads to the climate crisis. Women’s bodies are exploited in the same way: in a rape, we take the body, we use it and we throw it away. This way of being towards the other, it must be transformed and reversed in order to move towards a society of respect. This way of seeing the world, as a resource that can be wasted, applies to a lot of things and that’s all that needs to be changed. All this at the same root and we will get there.
Article co-written by Mathilde Wattecamps and Coline Clavaud-Mégevand.