This former diplomat should leave the Ministry of European Affairs to lead the LREM list to the European. She plans to bring her experience of complex files.
PORTRAIT
His sentence had not lacked theatricality, provoking Marine Le Pen's laughter. On March 14, Nathalie Loiseau, Minister of European Affairs, congratulated the President of the National Assembly on the set of L'Émission politique de France 2. "I wanted to congratulate you because you managed to change my mind and I am ready to run for [the European elections]," she said. "I will not go away." And to ensure that she had not warned anyone and therefore did not know what the decision makers of the majority thought.
READ ALSO - European Voting Intentions: the RN reduces the gap with LREM
Well, obviously, since Monday, Nathalie Loiseau should leave the government to take the reins of the list LREM European. A logical choice given the profile of this 54-year-old woman, with a brilliant career, without a hitch but not without feats of arms, and who gradually took a liking to politics.
A diplomat broken into difficult issues ...
Because before entering the government of Édouard Philippe in June 2017, to replace a Marielle de Sarnez splashed by the affair of the parliamentary assistants of his party, the MoDem, Nathalie Loiseau was not a politician. Her entire career, this graduate of the IEP of Paris and the Inalco (National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations) in Chinese made it into diplomacy. With the foreign affairs contest in her pocket at just 21, she went on to work in Indonesia, Senegal and Morocco before landing, between 2002 and 2007, at the French embassy in Washington.
It was here that this woman who had broken into the complicated negotiations - she had led some with the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia in the late 1980s - came out of the shadows. So at the head of the embassy's communication department, she has to manage the delicate episode of the war in Iraq, in which France refuses to commit herself, which triggers an outbreak of Francophobia across the Atlantic. The professionals of the com 'advise to wait until the storm passes. She and the ambassador, Jean-David Levitte, refuse to let themselves be drafted, writing an open letter published in the Washington Post . "All this time, she remained calm and serenity foolproof", will tell Jean-David Levitte nine years later to Liberation . "She's cool."
... and the Brussels negotiations
This is not the only quality we recognize at the age of fifty. After his announcement in L'Émission politique , Édouard Philippe had hailed on Europe 1 an "excellent minister, who knows remarkably well his files", "an extremely determined and fighting woman". In L'Express last week, parliamentarians LREM are raving about it. "Her competence and her commitment on European subjects, far from cosmetic applications", make her "able to take the leadership in Brussels", "she has the network and she knows the wheels," they say. "Its technicality would be very useful", abounds with Europe 1 a member of the government. But at LREM, some are also worried about a profile "too techno" to lead a campaign.
In fact, her position as European Affairs Minister in full Brexit led her into complex discussions. Without language, speaking in impeccable English, Nathalie Loiseau bluffed her counterparts and the British press. In a glowing portrait, The Times dubbed it "President Macron's Secret Weapon in the Battle of Brexit". And the journalist praised "a diplomat without fear, linguist, mother of four children [...] charming but formidable". Last string of an already well-supplied bow: she "wrote in her country a feminist bible," notes the British daily.
Ideas left and a career right
In Choose All , published in 2014 (Éd Lattès), Nathalie Loiseau encouraged women not to sacrifice their professional lives to the detriment of their private lives, and vice versa. Also evoked her permanent doubts, stemming in part from a society that moderates the ambition of little girls. These principles, she tried to implement when she was appointed, in 2012, at the head of the ENA. Second only woman to occupy this post, she had then fought for the feminization of the workforce, at the same time as for a reform of the entrance contest.
The title she had chosen, Choose All , is a formula borrowed from Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, Nathalie Loiseau being a believing and practicing Catholic. This does not prevent him, in La Croix , from affirming his disagreements with the pope. Or to publicly support marriage for all, then the PMA and the "ethical GPA". "All his speech is left, but his [diplomatic] career is on the right, it's very weird," said one of his friends in Libération in 2012.
In fact, Nathalie Loiseau got closer to Alain Juppé becoming the youngest of his cabinet Foreign Affairs in 1993. In Washington, his ambassador Jean-David Levitte was the sherpa of Nicolas Sarkozy. Back at the Quai d'Orsay in 2007, she had been ousted with the arrival of Laurent Fabius. Without, however, claiming any political color. "I'm not a right-wing official or a left-wing official," she told Le Monde in 2012.
The taste of politics
"Neither, nor", a post in a Macronist government seemed to him therefore already indicated. A little less than two years after taking office, Nathalie Loiseau is one of the ministers from civil society who have negotiated their turn. Édouard Philippe greeted Europe 1 a few weeks ago with his "very fine political sense". Why did you finally decide to commit? "Rejecting politics as an attempt to pursue an ideal of life in the city seems dramatic and dangerous," said the former diplomat in La Croix when she was appointed to the government. She is now part of "pursuing an ideal of life" at the European level.