“Republic resists, but for how long?”.

The leader of the French Greens, Marine Tondelier, assured that the risk of the extreme right coming to power in France after the early legislative elections has not disappeared, and that politics must be changed urgently to regain the confidence of voters.

“It was a wake-up call,” Tondelier says of the election, in which a spectacular avalanche of tactical voting in the second round halted Marine Le Pen’s far-right, anti-immigration National Rally (RN) party. The RN’s lead in the first round had put them closer than ever to a parliamentary majority and entry into government.

“The Republic resists, but for how long?” Tondelier asked in an interview Guardian In his Paris office, days after a left-wing coalition that includes his environmentalist party pulled ahead in the polls in a surprise result.

There is currently debate over what form of government France should form, and Tondelier, a 37-year-old environmentalist, is among the names being proposed for prime minister, a prospect he has not commented on, claiming that politics is more important than the people.

In the interview, he said it was important that France “does not continue for the next two years the same discriminatory public policies that break, exhaust and harm (society)” otherwise there could be a new wave of the far right in the presidential elections in 2027. “There are many people who want and need social justice and we are fighting for those people. Whether they voted for us or not, or they did not vote, we will fight for them anyway,” he said.

The broad left-wing coalition known as the New Popular Front – which includes Tondelier’s party, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s left-wing France Insoumise party, Socialists and Communists – came in first place, but was far from an absolute majority. Tondelier wrote on social media this week that Macron – who has insisted that no single political force wins the election and has called for a broad coalition – refuses to accept the election results. He assured that his refusal is “harming the country and democracy.”

Tondelier, a councillor from northern France who took the helm of the French Green Party (EELV) two years ago, has gone from being an unknown to a household name during the preliminary election campaign.

a personal struggle

According to analysts, Tondelier is known for his passionate appearances on television, his humorous insults towards far-right politicians and his distinctive green jacket, which he began wearing as a subliminal way of raising awareness about environmental problems, but which is now so well known that it has its own account on social networks.

If Tondelier’s heartfelt appeal won over voters of the centre and left, it was because his fight against the far right is intensely personal. He was born, raised and grew up in the former mining town of Hénin-Beaumont, north of the Pas-de-Calais. Its population of 27,000 inhabitants has suffered from factory closures and unemployment, and a decade ago the town went from being a major centre of the left to becoming Le Pen’s laboratory for gaining power.

Le Pen, who was born in Paris, was re-elected as an MP for the city last week. Since the far-right took over the Hénin-Beaumont town hall in 2014, Tondelier, as a local councillor, has fought against them at noisy town hall meetings. She has complained that the far-right was so upset by the opposition that they turned off her microphone at meetings, where she was called “hysterical” when she continued to speak. She wrote about it in a 2017 book, News from the frontwhich enraged the far right and read like a manual for left-wing resistance.

Tondelier, who worked for five years in air quality monitoring, says the years he spent confronting the far right at council meetings were his political training. “I learned everything from taking political blows in the face. It was difficult. It could have broken me into pieces, but it made me really strong.”

The voice of the tactical vote

So when the results of the first round of the election on June 30 showed the far right leading with more than half of the French vote and one step away from power, he immediately started working on tactical voting and withdrawing candidates to avoid splitting votes. “I was 10 years ahead of everybody else’s worries. I saw very experienced politicians stunned, in denial or angry, not knowing what to do, panicking, giving up or saying it was too late… But I was very calm and determined.”

Tondelier herself has already been on the sidelines of several elections to facilitate tactical voting to stop the far right in her northern region, including the 2015 regional election, “I know the political and human cost of this.” This time, she became the media voice of a massive tactical voting campaign across the country.

Five generations of Tondelier’s family come from the mining town where he still lives and raises his young son with his partner, who coaches the town’s triathlon club. Part of the family were farmers. His great-grandmother ran a tobacco shop and was the area’s first female taxi driver. His mother, a dentist, continues to practice in the town, as does his father, an acupuncturist and osteopath.

Taking on those bigger than her has become Tondelier’s political trademark, her supporters say. She joined the Greens as a student during farmer José Bové’s European election campaign in 2009, inspired by the fact that several years earlier he had destroyed a half-finished McDonald’s in a protest campaign. “The fight of David against Goliath has always fascinated me,” she says.

She went with other environmentalists to protest the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in 2009, and became a vegetarian for environmental reasons when she returned, realizing she was only eating meat out of politeness. In the north of France, in a rural area, being a vegetarian was rare at that time. When I told people I didn’t eat meat, I often heard, “Don’t worry, dear, we’ll give you ham instead.”

Humor against the far right

Tondelier believes that one of the reasons why the young far-right leader Jordan Bardella refused to debate him during the election campaign was that in his northern town he has learned to use humour effectively against the far-right. “If you shout, they shout back. It’s like a mud fight with a pig: you can train and progress, but it’s their favourite sport, so you’ll get dirty and stuck in the mud.” Humour, on the other hand, destabilises them, he says. “It’s a way to try to stay happy and positive.”

Tondelier’s famous green jacket hangs in his office next to his fan cap of the northern soccer club Lens, whose matches he attends. He bought his first green formal jacket second-hand for 50 euros and had to buy another when it wore out during the campaign. He also has a casual green denim jacket on display and a green puffer jacket for winter. “My thought was that it’s difficult to incorporate ecology into the debate, so if I wore a green jacket it would be a subliminal message… Now everyone asks me for the jacket, it’s more famous than I am.”

Tondelier confirms that humanitarianism is important in politics, and she learned this by helping social organisations that work with families sleeping on the street on the northern coast. During the 2015 regional election campaign, she regularly travelled to Calais, a huge shanty town where more than 8,000 refugees and migrants lived in very poor conditions. “I cried with shame all the way home,” she says. She believes that if all French people spent a day helping charities working with migrants, they might change their minds about politics.

When Tondelier had a son in December 2018, some told her that motherhood could be a respectable excuse if she wanted to quit campaigning and politics. However, that weekend, the biggest anti-government Yellow Vest protests over fuel tax took place at the same time as France’s big climate march. “I saw all this happening and I said to myself: of course we will continue. We have to save biodiversity and the climate.”