HomePoliticsSandrine Rousseau and Julien Bayou: a relationship in tension for years

Sandrine Rousseau and Julien Bayou: a relationship in tension for years

Julien Bayou’s counterattack, after Sandrine Rousseau’s accusations of acts of psychological violence, is the epilogue of stormy reports. These two figures of environmentalists have multiplied the passes of weapons for ten years.

Julien Bayou wanted to be very direct. “He crossed the line and everyone measures it”, advanced the environmentalist in the columns of the World Tuesday morning, targeting Sandrine Rousseau. The counterattack seeks to discredit the ecofeminist who, ten days earlier, spoke on television about the “behaviors” of her colleague in the Assembly “likely to undermine the moral health of women.” The deputy was then questioned about the report of her former partner.

Since then, the former party number one withdrew from the group’s co-presidency in the National Assembly and resigned from his duties within the movement. This streak comes after years of simmering tension between the two.

Rupture under Manuel Valls

The words are even stronger on the set of France 5 where he speaks a few hours later, the same place where Sandrine Rousseau mentioned his case.

“For me, feminism and McCarthyism should not be confused,” he says in a significant historical comparison.

His words, very harsh, have all the high point of a conflictive relationship of almost 10 years. Both spokesmen for the movement at the end of the 2010s, publicly divided when Manuel Valls arrived at Matignon, through press releases.

Events and thesis

While Julien Bayou pleads for the departure of Cécile Duflot, the then Minister of Housing, Sandrine Rousseau, who shares his opinion and says so in a forum, officially pushes for her maintenance. Green parliamentarians wanted at the time to give a chance to the Prime Minister’s proposal to give them a large Ministry of the Environment.

“One was for a certain ideological purity. The other supposed to do certain entryism to advance in our subjects. It leaves a bit thoughtful in hindsight”, a former elected Europe Ecology-The Greens explains to BFMTV.com.

Beyond the political differences, their paths oppose each other on paper. Julien Bayou came to ecology staging a forceful action. From the Générations précaires collective in 2005, which denounced the working conditions of apprentices, to Black Thursday in which it squats on very nice empty flats, passing through Sauvons les riche, the young man is carving out a niche for himself in the EELV machine.

Two ambitious young men

Sandrine Rousseau comes from academia. She worked on a thesis on environmental rent before teaching at Lille-1 and joining the Greens in the early 2000s. Her political education is done by Rachel Carson and her book silent springthat launched the environmental movement in the United States.

“We talk a lot about the activist Julien Bayou and the professor Sandrine Rousseau. Perhaps well, but very quickly, they took responsibility and each one understood how the machine worked”, advances Émile Meunier, EELV adviser from Paris.

One leaves, the other stays and goes up

Enough to whet their respective appetites. Both manage to be elected regional councillors, in Île-de-France and in Hauts-de-France. Sandrine Rousseau, however, suffered a real failure: she obtained less than 5% of the votes in the 2015 regional elections. Her political strategy then began to diverge. Where Julien Bayou accepts supporting roles, the feminist wants to be cast by her name.

A year later, he crossed swords with David Cormand to seize the party’s initiative. It is he who wins and Julien Bayou gets in his wheel. The defeat is even harder to accept as the elected official revealed 3 weeks earlier that she had been attacked by EELV deputy Denis Baupin.

A year later, the academic left the party while his former colleague continued his rise internally, until taking the leadership of the party in 2018. Enough to leave traces between these two figures of the movement.

“At one point, Sandrine felt that she had reached the limit of what the party could offer her. Julien, he never imagined himself outside”, deciphers an environmentalist parliamentarian.

A primary under high voltage

In 2021, the ecofeminist decides to withdraw her party card to run for the internal primaries of environmentalists for the presidential election.

Very soon, tensions galloped back. Sandrine Rousseau judges that Julien Bayou secretly supports Éric Piolle, the mayor of Grenoble, when he is officially neutral due to his status as number 1 in the party. In the middle of the summer day of the party, a few weeks before the vote of activists and supporters, Sandrine Rousseau accuses the councilor of having pushed her.

The head of the party responded two days later, in a letter to the Federal Council, claiming to have “carried out an investigation” that “concluded the innocence of Éric Piolle”. The scene is vividly remembered, even in the camp of MEP Yannick Jadot.

“We were trying to campaign by staying a little bit above this case. Julien Bayou was very tough at that time in a very intense campaign environment”, acknowledges one of the lieutenants of the future primary winner.

Excluded and reformulated

The ecofeminist finally narrowly lost the second round of the primaries against the MEP. At first, Sandrine Rousseau evades her endorsement of the winner, asking her to “take advantage of the movement behind her.”

“He’s a bit of a bad loser,” Julien Bayou then replies in front of journalists.

A few months later, while the transplant between her and Yannick Jadot had not yet taken place, she was finally excluded from the campaign after judging that the presidential candidate was “selling boilers”.

“Our great political strategists are zero. I’m going crazy. They crash into everything. It’s a mess,” he continues during a lunch with journalists, pointing, without naming him, to Julien Bayou.

Arm wrestling during the legislature

“Let the people who want to advance in the ecological campaign,” he replied a few hours later on BFMTV.

Yannick Jadot’s low presidential score seems to prove Sandrine Rousseau right, but it doesn’t prevent the party from resentful of her.

“I had the feeling that something was wrong with our candidacy. There is always an entourage, a leadership that wants to protect the candidate, sometimes clumsily,” deciphers Nour Durand-Rauche, vice president of Ecologists of Paris.

Should this be seen as a retaliatory measure? In the midst of negotiations with rebel France ahead of the legislative elections, Sandrine Rousseau announces that her name does not appear in the candidates selected for the capital. Instead, it is that of Claire Monod, an activist for Générations, the movement launched by Benoît Hamon, who was on the same list at the regional level in Île-de-France in 2021 as Julien Bayou.

“The negotiation phases are always a bluff. It was never suggested that it not be present on the lists,” however, one of the environmental negotiators assures.

a symbolic conference

Sandrine Rousseau ends up officially winning her candidacy and is elected to the National Assembly, along with 22 other deputies, including the head of the ecologists. Like it or not, the hitch holds, while the party struggles to find its marks in the hemicycle, after 5 years without any deputy.

Even a tweet: Relève féministe. If Julien Bayou had mentioned in the columns of Figaro in July a report from his former partner, it is this group that publicly questions Europe Écologie-Les Verts about the party’s alleged lack of reaction. on the set of Up to youquestioned about this case, responds Sandrine Rousseau.

If the ecofeminist has not spoken publicly since Julien Bayou came out of her silence, she has already set the tone.

“I don’t regret anything,” he told France 3.

Anxious not to aggravate the situation, she has not spoken since. What concludes her political relationship? At first, no. The next step should be the internal congress of environmentalists, which will be opposed by Mélissa Camara, a close friend of Sandrine Rousseau, and Marine Tondelier, a close friend of Julien Bayou.

Author: Mary Pierre Bourgeois
Source: BFM TV

Stay Connected
16,985FansLike
2,458FollowersFollow
61,453SubscribersSubscribe
Must Read
Related News

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here