MEP Marie Toussaint, 36, was named leader of the environmentalists for the 2024 European elections on Monday, the party announced after an internal vote by activists, effectively endorsing the principle of a list. autonomous. She collected 59.5% of the votes (out of 4,678 voters), ahead of David Cormand who will be number two on the list, announced the boss of EELV Marine Tondelier.
A lawyer, Marie Toussaint notably distinguished herself with “The Case of the Century”, a legal remedy against France’s climate inaction. In the European Parliament, she obtained the vote of European parliamentarians for the recognition of ecocide in European law. “I will make it a point of honor that environmentalists fight for a Europe of the living, and a Europe of justice”, she declared to the press, assuring that “the mother of battles is to re-embed the economy within planetary boundaries.
Believing that the campaign would be “difficult”, she also promised to “fight the extreme right head-on”, and affirmed that there was “no question of taking some regulatory environmental pause”, in response to about the President of the Republic Emmanuel Macron, whose “greenwashing” she denounced. Finally, “we must refuse the war of the lefts”, she said, asserting that she was “not a candidate to squander the capital of the unit with murderous little phrases. We can diverge without tearing each other apart.”
This vote by environmental activists de facto the principle of an autonomous list for the Europeans, while La France insoumise continues to try to convince its partners in the Nupes coalition of the need for a common list.
EELV members up to date with their contributions – 11,106 at the last count – were invited to vote online from Friday 6 a.m. to Monday 9 a.m., to validate or not this strategy of an autonomous list but with the possibility of inserting personalities from opening in the fall. They voted for 86%. They also voted 80% for the launch in October of a new movement, called Les Écologistes, a name that should eventually replace the name “EELV”. For statutory reasons, the two names (EELV and Les Écologistes) will remain for a while, Tondelier said.