French lawmakers elect Yaël Braun-Pivet as National Assembly president, first woman in role

Braun-Pivet’s election to the speaker’s chair follows the naming last month of Élisabeth Borne, the second woman to serve as French prime minister and the first in three decades. The promotions are cause for applause in France, still lagging on gender parity not least on the benches of the National Assembly despite laws meant to narrow the gap. But amid overlapping global crises, with French politics in unprecedented flux and Macron in a quandary for lack of an absolute legislative majority, some detect the Glass Cliff Effect: when all else fails, let a woman try to fix it – at her peril.

Born in Nancy, eastern France, in 1970, the granddaughter of Eastern European Jews who settled in France in the 1930s to escape anti-Semitism at home, Braun-Pivet is a criminal lawyer by trade. She built her legal career in the Paris area before pausing it in her mid-30s to follow her husband, an executive with the French cosmetics giant L’Oréal, to Taiwan and Japan, where the two youngest of the couple’s five children were born. Returning to France with her family in 2012 after seven years abroad, Braun-Pivet would transition to nonprofit work. She opened a Resto du Coeur soup kitchen and set up free legal help to fight social exclusion in suburban Paris.

Braun-Pivet has said she had always voted for France’s Socialist Party before opting in 2016 for Macron’s fledgling En Marche, a centrist political movement that pledged to get beyond the old left-right divide, do politics differently and tap into civil-society talent. “Getting beyond? I was experiencing that every day at the Restos, with volunteers from very different worlds, folks very left-wing, others very right-wing,” she told the left-leaning daily Libération earlier this year.

Braun-Pivet threw her hat in the ring for a legislative seat in suburban Paris in 2017 and won, part of Macron’s comfortable first-term absolute majority in the National Assembly. She was quickly elected president of the chamber’s Committee of Laws, a lofty position unheard of for a neophyte legislator, beating out more experienced male candidates.

As a committee chair under the spotlight, Braun-Pivet has herself admitted to a halting start, when she was tagged an amateur by veteran colleagues. She caught flak in the summer of 2018 amid a probe over the so-called Benalla Affair, named for the Élysée Palace staffer Alexandre Benalla, caught on camera roughing up demonstrators at a May Day rally. Refusing to summon close Macron associates to testify before the Committee of Laws, Braun-Pivet was accused of “protecting” the president’s office.

But despite those rough beginnings, Libération earlier this year wrote that it was hard-pressed to find a Braun-Pivet colleague with a harsh word for its profile on her, applauded as she appears to be all around for her collegial approach and positive demeanour. After Macron was re-elected in April, Braun-Pivet was promoted to a post in the cabinet, as minister for France’s Overseas Territories.

She would only last a month in that job – to the dismay of politicians in those territories Paris is commonly accused of neglecting – when, after winning re-election to the National Assembly in June, she threw her hat in the ring to replace its president, Richard Ferrand, a close Macron ally defeated at the ballot box. Braun-Pivet had first sought the Assembly presidency in 2018 before withdrawing her candidacy in favour of Ferrand, although at the time she scoffed that Macron’s longtime associate “didn’t incarnate renewal”.

Renewal… and stagnation

Braun-Pivet’s arrival at the rostrum – a post held by 14 men since the dawn of the French Fifth Republic in 1958 – does stand as a marker of renewal in France.

After all, the country is second-to-last in the European Union, ahead of only Slovakia, to elevate a woman to the head of one of its houses of parliament. Austria was the first, way back in 1927. Neighbours beat France to the distinction by decades; Germany in 1972 and Italy in 1979, the same year France’s Simone Veil became the first woman to preside over the European Parliament. In the United States, both houses are currently headed by women, with Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House and Vice-President Kamala Harris presiding over the Senate. The French Senate, meanwhile, is still waiting for its first woman president.

“It’s about time,” former National Assembly president Jean-Louis Debré told BFM TV on Tuesday, before Braun-Pivet’s pioneering accession to the position.

Indeed, Braun-Pivet arrives to preside over the lower-house chamber at a time when women are, increasingly at least, the face of French politics.

Last month, Macron named Élisabeth Borne prime minister, making her only the second woman to hold that post and the first since Édith Cresson’s brief tenure 31 years ago. The house’s majority leader – Aurore Bergé, 35, of Macron’s Renaissance party – is also now held by a woman for the first time, alongside a rare handful of women newly elected to head some of the National Assembly’s other groups: Marine Le Pen for the far-right National Rally (RN), Mathilde Panot for the far-left La France Insoumise (“France Unbowed” or LFI), and Cyrielle Chatelain, co-chief of the ecology group in the lower house.

But given the state of play in the National Assembly, those high-ranking women may be the trees obscuring a forest… of men.

As France’s new legislature begins, the chamber remains a long way from achieving gender parity. Indeed, it slid backwards on that score in June’s legislative elections with only 215 of 577 lower-house seats won by women (37.26 percent), down from 224 (38.8 percent) in 2017. Among 27 EU countries, that proportion of women deputies puts France in seventh place.

The legislative class of 2017 had been a historic leap forward towards gender parity, with 69 more seats won by women compared to 2012. A fact that appears to make the sudden backslide all the more disappointing.

It’s “a historic drop”, said Fabienne El-Khoury, spokesperson for French activist group Osez le féminisme. “The number of women elected to the National Assembly is diminishing for the first time after decades of progress.”

And that despite laws in France meant to encourage political parties to feminise their ranks. Political parties are docked public subsidies – attributed on the basis of the votes they receive in legislative elections – for every 2 percent deviation from perfect parity.

“The law doesn’t oblige (parity). It only compels it,” Osez le féminisme notes. “So there are political parties that prefer to pay up rather than have women candidates.”

Six parties were fined for falling short of parity in 2017, with the conservative Les Républicains (LR) docked €1.8 million after only 40 percent of the legislative candidates it put forward that year were women. Not that LR learned its lesson for this time around; in June, only 39 percent of its legislative nominees were women. As a result, they make up only 29 percent of the conservative party’s seats in the new legislature, according to a FRANCE 24 tally.

France’s political parties aren’t all equal in falling short of parity. But the Greens (Europe Écologie-Les Verts) are the only party to tip the balance the other way, with 54 percent of its deputies women. The French Communist Party is ranked last with 16.66 percent. Macron’s Renaissance stands at 40 percent. Women make up 52 percent of the general French population.

El-Khoury says one key to making up the difference would be for parties to buck the trend and consent to running women in winnable districts.

“Men are often better known to voters and better recognised within their own parties with a balance of power in their favour,” she said, explaining there are many obstacles “to battle” in order to allow women to rise up the party ranks.

“Accounts of sexist and sexual harassment within parties and on social media are still too frequent. Woman candidates are more often the victims, on Twitter in particular. That can dissuade a lot of women from running for office,” El-Khoury explained.

Braun-Pivet being handed the National Assembly’s gavel is, then, only a start. But one, many will agree, better than the alternative.