Foreign Affairs
Meet One of the Rassemblement National’s New MPs
Are politicians like Sophie-Laurence Roy the future of the French right?
“I am French, very French,” Sophie-Laurence Roy avows, as we bound across the hills of northern Burgundy in her sedan. Roy draws on her cigarette, and gestures at the vine-dappled slopes and the rolling prairies. “Look at this, how lucky I am to be here.”
Roy’s technicolor exuberance shines through six days after her election as our district’s new member of Parliament. The victory of the sexagenarian Paris attorney represents a milestone in both her career and that of her party, the Rassemblement National. For the first time in her life, she now holds elective office, and for the first time in its existence, the RN has captured all three constituencies in the department of the Yonne, a stretch of postcard-worthy countryside two hours from the capital.
The populist right’s local hat-trick was one of the few consolation prizes after the French legislative elections. The RN had anticipated that it would govern France, particularly after the first round of elections, in which the party beat its competitors in more than half of the country’s 577 districts. The RN’s groundswell, however, could not breach the “republican dam”—the party gained a measly 143 deputies in the National Assembly after President Macron’s centrist bloc, Ensemble, and the left’s Nouveau Front Populaire, made common cause to defeat them.
The “republican dam” almost scuttled Roy’s ship. The entire wax museum of local notables sprang to life to oppose her. On the eve of the second round of the election, one grandee after another took the stage in my adopted hometown, Tonnerre, to denounce her. Cedric Clech, Tonnerre’s mayor, intoned his belief “that our city’s greatest asset is its diversity.” Andre Villiers, the incumbent and member of Macron’s party, cautioned that the populist right had coarsened public debate, menaced the country’s free institutions, and imperiled women’s rights. Five minutes later, he ridiculed his opponent as “Mrs. Whatever” and “that blonde lady.” Villiers, around whom the left had coalesced, advised the crowd immigrants from around the world were needed to bring in the local harvest. The district, however, could not trust someone from Paris to bring home the bacon—a principal (and false) line of attack against Roy being she was a Parisian interloper.
The soirée seemed to reproduce all the contradictions of France’s decrepit political class. The general public had not been invited to what had been billed as “a republican assembly.” The floor was open to questions, but few were actually posed, because the audience was composed of local elites. Rather than engage in introspection, the speakers inveighed against “the brown menace” of the ascendant right. But on the night of the second round, Roy edged out Villiers by 395 votes.
Roy seems unfazed by the opposition her candidacy elicited, even as she acknowledges that some of her erstwhile friends among Yonne’s grandees have disavowed her. “I don’t give a damn about them,” she says. “I am here for the voters.”
“Instead of asking what I will do if they won’t work with me, you should ask them what this will mean for them,” she continues. “Half of the people in our district voted for me and the RN.”
The road goes on before us and the calls come in. Roy, elected to Parliament on Sunday, has had her home burglarized on Thursday. “These are only material items,” she says with a shrug after finishing with the insurance agent. “I didn’t put on that jewelry anyway. It made me look old!”
Next comes a ring from a local ally, who asks her about hiring staff for her office. Roy admits that she has no idea how to sort through the dozens of applications that have flooded in, and says that she will rely on the RN party apparatus to help her do so. “I have only been at this for a month. I have to be able to call on the expertise of others.”
Roy spent the four decades of her legal career as a habitué of mergers and acquisitions; flesh-pressing and button-holing are henceforth her lot. For now, she is only equipped with a parliamentary parking pass and a tricolor broach. We pull into Ancy-le-Franc, where an agricultural fair is supposed to occur. The festivities are nowhere to be found, so we return to the town of Tonnerre.
The attorney’s whirlwind campaign began, she recounts, on the night of June 9, when the RN carried the European Union parliament elections and Macron dissolved the National Assembly. She decided to throw her hat in the ring as a candidate for Les Républicains, the center-right heir of Charles de Gaulle’s party. Eric Ciotti, then the president of LR, had concluded an alliance with the RN. In the space of a few days, after a phone conversation with Ciotti, she received the nomination of both parties. When LR’s other leaders revolted against Ciotti, Roy followed him out of the party.
“Eric’s decision was right, courageous,” she argues. “LR had become an extension of Macron. We needed to be part of a real alternative.”
Roy confides that she ran out of a fear that France is in a profound state of malaise. From increases in energy prices driven by the state’s “green” agenda (qualified, in her terms, as “anti-human”); to the rising urban crime tied to immigration; to the plight of local farmers bedeviled by EU rules, she felt that now was her time. Roy also refers to her Christian faith as a motive. “I have been very fortunate in this life. And so I must give back. I am a servant.” Pointing to her crucifix, and alluding to her detractors, she jests: “I have borne this cross for the entire campaign, and I’ll keep on doing so.”
After the RN’s failure to capture a majority in parliament, Roy acknowledges that there is little she can change in the short-term. Nevertheless, she intends to serve as a conduit between just plain folks and the impersonal state institutions that control (and often worsen) their lives. “I am here to listen, and sometimes to watch and alert,” she muses.
We arrive in Tonnerre and sit down at a bistro to have a coffee. From across the street, we eye a cafe notorious for attracting the town’s ne’er-do-wells, layabouts, and drug fiends. Tonnerre was once a prosperous city, but two decades ago, the Thomson consumer electronics factory shuttered. The managers and technicians left; the city’s numbers were saved from collapse by an influx of immigrants pushed out of Paris in a process the French call “social cleansing.” This process has intensified in the run-up to the Paris Olympics. I have lived in Tonnerre off-and-on for the past five years. I came back here this summer to find homeless men strung out on the sidewalk and brawls breaking out on the street.
“You have to be blind not to see that this sort of immigration is a problem,” Roy observes. “I have no problem with immigration as such, but those who come here must respect our ways, our culture, our laws. Something has gone very wrong, and we need to act.”
Roy explicitly dismisses a definition of the French nation as based on race, even as she defends a central idea of the RN’s program: la priorité nationale (national priority), in which certain forms of state aid and services would be reserved for French nationals. “French come in every color; I have a granddaughter who is a dual national,” she posits. “This is not a matter of race, but of what nations owe to their citizens.”
In the course of our interview, the new deputy chats with a few constituents. Mostly, she listens and nods. “I am an attorney,” she explains. “I already do a lot of this with my clients.” Roy’s status as a native daughter helps. She exchanges tips on where to find the best gougère (a sort of cheese-filled popover roll invented in her hometown, Flogny-la-Chapelle) with one woman. Roy endures a 20-minute rant about Tonnerre’s woes from a local harridan. “I am grateful she’s an entrepreneur creating wealth here,” she reasons, brushing off my criticism.
She can be elusive without being evasive. I query her as to the reasons for the RN’s underwhelming performance, advancing my pet theory of why the party lost: that the RN failed to recruit credible and locally-connected candidates in far too many districts. “We need to see about that. I don’t want to just blow smoke,” she replies.
Roy will need all the equanimity and bonhomie she can summon. France’s National Assembly is now inoperable, and Macron will probably call elections at the earliest opportunity possible—in 11 months’ time. She will then again have to face the voters, in a possible rematch against Villiers. Her strategy relies on being accessible: She plans on holding regular town hall meetings and setting up offices in more places than her predecessor—becoming the Yonne’s “Mrs. Pothole.”
As we bid each other goodbye, I invite her to reflect on a phrase from the conservative intellectual Alain Finkielkraut. Finkielkraut, a skeptic of mass migration, has fretted that France is “at once precious and perishable.” She pauses. “We are more durable than you think,” she exclaims. “You’ll see.”
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