Although she has not officially declared her candidacy for the upcoming presidential election scheduled for 2027, the ecologist Cécile Duflot, former Housing Minister, is ready to commit herself to defeating the far right.
In political circles, her name had circulated again following the dissolution of the National Assembly in June 2024. But Cécile Duflot, who served as Housing Minister (2012-2014) during François Hollande’s five-year term, regarded herself as more useful as chief executive of the poverty-fighting NGO Oxfam France, a role she has held since announcing she would leave politics after losing her seat as a Green MP in 2017. But now she publishes Gagnons ! (Les petits matins editions), a small political-strategy book aimed at uniting the left to prevent a National Rally victory in 2027.
Rallying the left, or counting on one’s own supporters? At 50, Cécile Duflot shows she is ready to get back in the saddle. “In 2011, everyone was surprised when I admitted that I did not have the shoulders to be a candidate in the presidential election, she recalls. Today, after ten years in the private sector, ten years of high-level politics and nearly ten years in an international organization, I have the shoulders.” A clear but cautious announcement, aware of the risk of an overabundance of candidacies that would place the left back in the situation of the disaster of 2002: “I do not want to be the nth name of an election whose stakes are much higher.”
The risk of the far right
With less than 500 days to the presidential election, the equation facing the left is fairly simple: how to stop the bulldozer of the far right, largely at the top of the polls? “If the country had to choose between Attal and Glucksmann, I would have kept my mouth shut, insists Cécile Duflot. But there is a huge risk that our country will tilt toward the far right.”
Since taking the helm of Oxfam’s French branch, she has observed how illiberal regimes target intermediary bodies, starting with associations. “When you work internationally, you see the concrete consequences of the far right coming to power: in Narendra Modi’s India, in two years, Oxfam went from 150 employees to just one”, she illustrates.
Within the European Union itself, in Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, where the National Rally’s ally, the organizers of Prides, face legal action, are threatened with lawsuits. In September 2022, Green MEP Gwendoline Delbos-Corfield published a report highlighting that where it took a decade for the Hungarian prime minister to seize most of the powers, eighteen months would suffice in France. “I was already protesting against authoritarian measures adopted by Manuel Valls, which we today fear may be used to muzzle counter-powers”, notes Cécile Duflot.
The left, ecology and the people
So much water has flowed under the bridge since the time when the left in power tore itself apart over how to exercise it, and where Cécile Duflot slammed the door of the government to protest what was deemed too soft a line from François Hollande. She willingly admits today that her departure from the government was a “political error, which did not yield the expected result and which ended up making Jean-Luc Mélenchon the representative of the left of the Socialist Party.” Or, she considers today, “politics cannot be ‘the program, just the program’: compromises are needed”.
Split in view of the next presidential election, the left should, in her view, recognize its unity “around social-ecology: protecting the environment is protecting our way of life”. And she elaborates: “We have let the idea take hold that ecology opposes defending the most precarious. It is a mistake; the left cannot abandon the working-class electorate to Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella.” Yet, she argues, it is necessary to adapt its platform. “I have changed my mind about video surveillance, she says, for instance. I used to fear the encroachment on liberties, but the fact remains that if it does not reduce crime, video surveillance helps solve investigations.” Similarly, regarding drug trafficking, the former minister calls to “not minimize the reality of the danger posed by traffics and mafias that take root”, while advocating the legalization of cannabis to be able to implement a real prevention policy.
“The heritage of France is not only churches and fortresses, but a spirit of liberty dating from 1789”, the head of Oxfam again insists, praising having put on the table “the question of super-héritages” and ardently defending, as does a certain Lucie Castets, public services. The sketch of a presidential program that already seems well developed.
