The number one Ecologist, a native of Pas-de-Calais, is experienced in activism against the extreme right, which she has been fighting for a long time on her land, in Hénin-Beaumont. The journey of the author of News from the Front (The Links that Liberate, “Pocket”, 224 pages, 8.90 euros) allowed him to acquire a form of resilience, which helps him to cope with the violence of political life.
Since your involvement in politics, when have you felt like you were paying a price when it came to mental health?
My political journey is in fact a continuum of difficulties, there is not “one” moment in particular, it is a little (a lot) all the time, continuously, for more than ten years. Elected in opposition to the National Rally since 2014, the only elected environmentalist in my entire town, I built myself through adversity, and this method of training has a lot to do with who I am politically today. I have difficulty isolating a specific example because many come to me, and then it is not necessarily the hardest moments in themselves that are the hardest for me. I can absorb enormous political shocks in fluctuat nec mergitur mode and suddenly be affected, for weeks, by something that would, seen from the outside, be an organizational detail. It’s because I need to be solid on my feet. These things need to be worked on but can never be completely mastered.
This summer, after the dissolution of the National Assembly on June 9, many people asked me how I was holding up. But, curiously, it was not these weeks of express campaigning that seemed the most difficult to me, firstly because I knew exactly why I was there and what to do, it was instinctive. Then because I was in the action and I didn’t even have time to think about it. And finally because I had the feeling of doing something useful. What is more complicated in politics on a mental level is when you give a lot and you don’t have the feeling of being useful. And for our loved ones, it’s the same thing! They need to understand why we do all this.
Of course, there is sense, but in your book “News from the Front”, you describe a daily life of insults, humiliations, and even threats in Hénin-Beaumont, where you were elected in opposition facing a far-right town hall. How did you learn to hold?
When I was young, when I joined a literary prep school in Lille, thirty minutes from the Pas-de-Calais mining basin where I lived, I first experienced territorial contempt. They explained to me that I didn’t speak French, which was somewhat true: well, let’s just say that I had an accent to cut with a knife. Then, when I got involved in politics at home, in Hénin-Beaumont, and especially in the urban area where I was one of the youngest elected officials, I was confronted with a hierarchy based on age, the accumulation of mandates… I had no experience, no codes, many explained to me that I did not have to speak, neither in meetings of the socialist group to which I was attached, nor in sessions. But I had the impression that if I did not jump into the pool, if I did not speak out, I would spend my political life paralyzed at the edge of the pool, that I would not progress, and therefore that I would not be useful, which is still the goal when you are elected.
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