She is one of the high-profile figures of the generation of Macron supporters who burst into French political life in 2017 from a background of civil society. "The French no longer want career politicians," Yaël Braun-Pivet declared as recently as two years ago. However, having been re-elected president of the Assemblée Nationale on Thursday, July 18, at the age of 53 she is settling into a political career that is only growing in stature.
Braun-Pivet, the first woman to be elected to president of the Assemblée, in 2022, took the helm of an institution where the presidential coalition had failed to win an absolute majority. At the time, she promised to "build consensus and compromise". On Thursday, asserting that she had "done a lot of innovating at the Assemblée Nationale despite a relative majority," the newly re-elected president promised to "very quickly bring together the political groups to invent new working methods. Since there are several blocs in this Assemblée, we need to find other ways of working, to try and achieve greater dialogue and compromise".
Braun-Pivet has learned the trade, but not without difficulty. "Since I was elected in 2017, it's been nothing but a rollercoaster ride," she told French newspaper Le Parisien on June 26, 2022. Enthused by not-yet president Emmanuel Macron's project as early as 2016, she unexpectedly became an MP the following year in the 5th constituency of Yvelines, west of Paris, becoming president of the Assemblée Nationale's Law Commission in the process.
Her surprise election to a position traditionally reserved for seasoned lawmakers got off to a rocky start. She found herself on the front line of the 2018 Benalla scandal, the Macron aide who was filmed dressed illegally in police gear, beating up a young man during a demonstration. Because she refused to summon members of the president's entourage, she was accused of protecting the Elysée. She described it as an "intense and seminal" period. Other such periods followed: the Yellow Vests crisis, the Covid crisis...
While she does not define herself as a practiser or a believer, she is the granddaughter of a Jewish tailor who moved from Poland to France to escape anti-Semitism in the 1930s, and has been the target of anti-Semitic threats and insults ever since stepping into the political arena.
But Braun-Pivet is not easily deterred, and her resolve has proved invaluable in her accession to the Assemblée Nationale's podium. She tried her luck in 2018 but lost. In 2022, she returned to the fray. It was little more than a month after she had been appointed Minister for Overseas Territories in Elisabeth Borne's government and she disregarded the fact that the Elysée didn't approve.
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