Sandrine Rousseau | |
Office: | Member of the National Assembly for Paris's 9th constituency |
Term Start: | 21 June 2022 |
Predecessor: | Buon Tan |
Birth Date: | 8 March 1972 |
Birth Place: | Maisons-Alfort, France |
Party: | Europe Ecology – The Greens (until 2017; since 2020) |
Spouse: | François-Xavier Devetter (divorced) |
Children: | 3 |
Alma Mater: | University of Poitiers University of Lille |
Sandrine Rousseau (pronounced as /fr/; born 8 March 1972) is a French economist and politician who has represented the 9th constituency of Paris in the National Assembly since 2022. Member of Europe Ecology – The Greens (EELV), she has been widely seen as a figurehead of France's MeToo movement against sexual violence, and describes herself as an ecofeminist.[1]
Rousseau previously served as a vice-president of the University of Lille.[2]
Rousseau was raised in Nieul-sur-Mer, France, where her father Yves Rousseau was mayor from 2001 to 2008.[3]
Rousseau became a candidate in the 2010 French regional elections for the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region, in third position on the Nord list. Following a merger of the left-wing lists, she was elected in the second round on the united list led by Daniel Percheron. She was appointed vice-president of the Regional Council of Nord-Pas-de-Calais, in charge of Research and Higher Education.
From 2011, Rousseau was part of the EELV national leadership, under chairwoman Cécile Duflot.[4]
In March 2020, Rousseau was elected president of the Conférence permanente des chargés(e)s de mission égalité et diversité (CPED), which is composed of ninety-four public institutions of higher education and research around equality and diversity policies.[5]
In 2021, Rousseau was a candidate for the open primary vote organized by Europe Ecology – The Greens for the 2022 French presidential election.[6] She qualified for the second round but lost to Yannick Jadot.[7] She later joined Jadot’s campaign team[8] but, by March 2022, was asked to leave again after she had expressed strong criticism of the campaign strategy.[9]
During the 2022 French legislative election, Rousseau was elected deputy to the National Assembly for Paris's 9th constituency, as a member of the New Ecologic and Social People's Union.[10] In parliament, she has since been a member of the Committee on Social Affairs.[11]
In 2016, Rousseau was one of several female politicians – including Isabelle Attard, Elen Debost and Annie Lahmer – who made headlines for accusing Green party colleague and MP Denis Baupin of sexual harassment.[12] [13] In 2022, she suggested in a TV interview that her colleague Julien Bayou had exhibited “behavior which could break women’s psychological health” and said that Bayou’s former partner had later attempted suicide; the Green Party’s parliamentary group subsequently suspended Bayou from his role as the group’s co-chair, and he later stepped down as secretary as well.[14] [15]
In 2021, Rousseau was criticized for being too absent on her university post, because of her participation in the electoral campaign.[16] In 2022 she sparked controversy by proposing that the law make non-participation in household chores a criminal offence.[17]
In August 2022, France’s National Hunting Federation (FNC) filed a complaint against Rousseau after she had stated "that one femicide out of four [was] linked to a hunting weapon.“[18]
On 12 November 2023, she took part in the March for the Republic and Against Antisemitism in Paris in response to the rise of anti-Semitism in France since the start of the Israel–Hamas war.[19]