Nathalie Loiseau

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Nathalie Loiseau (2019)

Nathalie Loiseau (born on June 1, 1964 in Neuilly-sur-Seine as Nathalie Ducoulombier ) is a French diplomat and politician ( LREM ). From 2012 to 2017 she headed the École nationale d'administration . From June 2017 to March 2019 she was Minister for European Affairs. She has been a member of the European Parliament since 2019 .

Life

Nathalie Loiseau's father was a management consultant on mergers and acquisitions. At the age of 16 she graduated from a Paris high school (Lycée Carnot). She enrolled in the Institut d'études politiques de Paris (Sciences Po), which she successfully completed in 1983. For the student council election in 1980 she ran for the Union des étudiants de droite (UED; "Union of Right Students"), a nationalist and anti-communist list with ties to the right-wing extremist Front National . When this became public in the 2019 European election campaign, Loiseau initially denied it, but then admitted it and described it as a "youthful sin". She then studied Sinology at the Institut national des langues et civilizations orientales (Inalco).

Career as a diplomat

In 1986 she applied for a position in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs through a selection process. For the European elections in 1989, she ran on the pro-European list Initiative pour une démocratie européenne by Franck Biancheri , which received only 0.17% of the vote. From 1990 to 1992 she worked in Jakarta , where she also met her husband. She then became Embassy Secretary ( Legation Councilor ) in Indonesia , Senegal and Morocco . In Dakar she befriended the writer Catherine Clément . In 1993 she became the youngest member of the staff of Foreign Minister Alain Juppé .

From August 2002 to July 2007 she was head of the press service and spokeswoman for the French embassy in Washington. In 2003, during the Iraq war , in which France did not participate, there was open criticism from the American government and the public. Nathalie Loiseau and Ambassador Jean-David Levitte responded: “Bush, Congress and the Third Power were against us. And all of our gurus advised us to let it be, ”explains Jean-David Levitte. “With Nathalie, who was in charge of communications, we decided to take retaliation. And we won. The whole time she stayed calm and serene. She has serenity. ”In an unusual initiative, Levitte and Loiseau published a letter in the Washington Post . The anti-French mood in the USA calmed down.

Nathalie Loiseau in 2016

In 2007 she was appointed Deputy Head of North Africa at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In 2008 she became director for North Africa and the Middle East and at the same time head of the Association Syndicale des Agents d'Orient (ASAO), an association of diplomats in the Middle East, where she distinguished herself through her commitment to combating discrimination. In 2009 she was appointed Head of Human Resources in the Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs.

In November 2011, Alain Juppé appointed her director general in the administration of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a prominent position in a male-dominated ministry. After the change of government, however, she was released again in August 2012 at the instigation of the new Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius .

Loiseau was director of the École nationale d'administration (ENA) elite university from 2012 to 2017 . She understood her work as: “… paying attention to the students and teaching them leadership skills. They are intelligent, but that is not enough to make them good managers ”. She also worked on reforming entrance exams to limit discrimination.

Political career

Nathalie Loiseau 2017 with the Dutch Foreign Minister Halbe Zijlstra (2017)
Loiseau (3rd from left) in Vienna with Ewald Nowotny , Karin Kneissl and Gernot Blümel (2018)

From June 21, 2017 to March 27, 2019, she was the successor to Marielle de Sarnez as French Minister for European Affairs in the Philippe II cabinet . She joined the La République en Marche party founded by President Emmanuel Macron . As Minister for Europe, she was also concerned with Britain's exit from the EU . Regarding this slow process, she told a newspaper in mid-March 2019 that she had renamed her cat in Brexit because “the animal meows loudly every morning to be let outside, but refuses to go out when I have opened the door ". However, Loiseau did not own a cat at the time; it should just be a "satirical joke".

For the 2019 European elections , Loiseau stood as the top candidate on the Renaissance list , which was formed by LREM, MoDem and smaller parties as well as non-party candidates from the pro-European center. The list came in second with 22.4% of the vote, just behind the far-right Rassemblement National .

In the week after the election of the European Parliament, Loiseau, who was apparently chosen by President Emmanuel Macron to win allies for his European policy, invited twelve journalists from French-language newspapers to a meeting later described in the press as "unusual". During the 45-minute event, she insulted potential allies such as Guy Verhofstadt or Angela Merkel in a rant . Nathalie Loiseau later denied the insults and apologized for her comments, raising questions about her suitability and speculation about the extent of the political damage done.

In the European Parliament, Loiseau is a member of the liberal Renew Europe group . She is Chair of the Subcommittee on Security and Defense , Deputy Chair of the Delegation for Relations with the NATO Parliamentary Assembly , Member of the Committee on Foreign Affairs and Delegate for Relations with the Maghreb Countries and the Arab Maghreb Union and the Parliamentary Assembly the Union for the Mediterranean .

Private life

Loiseau is married and has four children.

Fonts

  • Choisissez tout , JC Lattès, 2014
  • La démocratie en BD , Casterman , 2016

Web links

Commons : Nathalie Loiseau  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Nadia Pantel: Courage for the memory gap. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , April 23, 2019.
  2. ↑ a b c Pascale Nivelle: Nathalie Loiseau. Femme d'Etat. In: Liberation . November 25, 2012, accessed July 1, 2018 (French).
  3. ↑ a b c d [1] from Le Monde of November 5, 2012. Quotation: "Peu de femmes s'étaient hissées à ce niveau dans un ministère réputé phallocrate."
  4. ^ Karl de Meyer: Nathalie Loiseau, elle fait l'Europe selon Macron. In: Les Échos . December 8, 2017, accessed July 1, 2018 (French).
  5. ↑ France's EU minister names her cat 'Brexit' of March 18, 2019 in The Independent
  6. ↑ “The European Minister has no“ Brexit ”cat” L'essentiel of March 22, 2019
  7. ^ Jon Stone: "Macron's EU ambitions slipping away after top ally's bizarre rant" independent.co.uk of June 13, 2019
  8. ^ Entry on Nathalie Loiseau in the European Parliament 's database of deputies
personal data
SURNAME Loiseau, Nathalie
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Ducoulombier, Nathalie (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French diplomat and politician
DATE OF BIRTH June 1, 1964
PLACE OF BIRTH Neuilly-sur-Seine