She is a member isolated among her comrades, during the parliamentary days of the Greens in Strasbourg on Thursday 6 and Saturday 7 October. If in one year, Sandrine Rousseau has become a media figure of the movement, the one who speaks for the victims of sexist and sexual violence divides her own political family.
Sandrine Rousseau lives the ups and downs of the political adventure in a very closed circle, with in particular a very close adviser who takes care of just about everything. Also, we could see the environmentalist quite alone this week, away in the hemicycle, and fulminate on his bench on Tuesday, with dark eyes, towards deputies from all sides coming to support Julien Bayou.
Within the ecologist party, Sandrine Rousseau leaves no one indifferent. One of her fellow MPs says she knows how to work as a team, and describes her as “hard worker”, “serious” but “a little excessive”. “There is a TV Malaise thing with Sandrine”strikes a framework of the environmentalist party, which does not carry it in his heart.
The latter affirms, moreover, that the ecofeminist lacks even “sorority” – female solidarity – with the other women in her group: “Everyone has to support her, but she never supports nobody”. Another Green MP tempers: “It’s Sandrine who occupies the boulevard: she annoys, but she does things.” He prefers to summarize in these terms : “It hurts us as much as it does us good.”
“With her, it’s white or black”
The moment that crystallizes the tensions undoubtedly remains the sequence on the set of C à Vous, on France 5, which initiated the Bayou affair. In one minute of television, the cleavage turned into a fracture. Sandrine Rousseau evokes facing the camera the psychological violence that Julien Bayou would have subjected to his ex-companion: for several members of his camp, she has just crossed a red line. “She has a totalitarian ideology: with her, it’s white or black”slip a heavyweight of the socialist camp.
>> Bayou affair: “Sandrine Rousseau should not have become the spokesperson for a case of which she does not know much”, reacts Olivier Faure
In his entourage, we assume this radicalism. For one of his relatives, it is even a priesthood. “These revelations weaken Sandrine a lot”, he regrets, three months before the congress of the Greens. “She doesn’t do it for fun”according to him, but for women, believing that if Sandrine Rousseau is presented as a buzz machine, she brings back to the environmentalist camp of the militants, and especially an unexpected visibility for a sleeping party.