Sophia Chikirou in “Le Monde”, from shadow adviser to head of the Nupes list

On count them on the fingers of one hand. Sophia Chikirou is now part of a very restricted circle. That of the five winners on the evening of the first round of the legislative elections, Sunday June 12. As for the three other early elected members of the New Popular Ecological and Social Union (Nupes), his victory (53.74% of the vote), in the 6e constituency of Paris, was hailed by Jean-Luc Mélenchon. “Magnificent election for an activist who is very responsible for our movement”, rejoiced the leader of La France insoumise (LFI) on his Twitter account.

For years the name of the new deputy has been inseparable from that of the strong man of Nupes. Sophia Chikirou also appears in The world, on April 21, 2016, in the course of an article describing the start of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s second presidential campaign. The leader of the Left Party, ancestor of LFI, and his team then want to draw inspiration from Bernie Sanders, candidate for the Democratic nomination against Hillary Clinton. “His former press secretary, Sophia Chikirou, was even sent to the United States to campaign for Mr. Sanders and bring back ideas for that of Mr. Mélenchon”, writes Raphaëlle Besse Desmoulières.

“It was she who pushed Mélenchon to multiply in holograms, suddenly outdated communicators with a thousand campaigns. », Ariane Chemin, journalist

Three days later, the journalist from World comes back in more detail on this American trip. The one who became an advisor to Mélenchon chose to [se] mixes[r] to all militant actions” to try to grasp “how we make the decision to vote for a ‘radical’, ‘outsider’ candidate given the loser by the media”. “I want to understand how you go from a ‘social democratic’ vote to a revolutionary vote”, she indicates. “She is already learning lessons from it”, says the journalist, in particular “on the way the senator from Vermont uses digital (…) A common point already links the campaigns of the two men: the use of an interactive Web platform”.

Jean-Luc Mélenchon finished fourth (19.58%) in the 2017 presidential election. A month later, M The magazine of the World paints a portrait of the leader of LFI, entitled “Fault Lines”. Sophia Chikirou figures prominently there. She has “spent four years abroad, including several months in Spain with the Podemos movement of Pablo Iglesias, recalls Ariane Chemin. It was she who pushed Mélenchon to multiply in holograms, suddenly outdated communicators with a thousand campaigns. The activist evokes the previous presidential election: “ The confrontation with journalists, in 2012, was thought out, organized, theorized. I implemented “the sound and the fury”: we started from 3%, it was our only chance to exist. Now we have to get around them,” she explains.

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