Continuing my quest for “cool people of the European Parliament”, I present you Nathalie Loiseau, former diplomat, former director of ENA, former French Minister for EU affairs and much more. Loiseau’s clear and direct communication style makes her a prominent figure in European politics; I had the great pleasure to learn about her inspiring life and ideas.
Loiseau was born in Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1964 but grew up in Batignolles-Monceau, the 17th Arrondisement of Paris. “I spent my childhood and adolescence there. I was enrolled in public schools, which was very convenient for my family, as it was paid by the state. My classmates had mixed backgrounds, some were wealthy, some other poor. My best friend was the daughter of the baker.”
Nathalie’s father had a small business in mergers and acquisitions, her mother was a housewife. “We were constantly oscillating between prosperity and very difficult times, which taught me not to take anything for granted. My mother used to be a movie stars photographer, living the glamorus life of Paris in the Fifties, then all of a sudden she married and decided, with some regrets, to stay at home and take care of me and my older brother.”
Politics was discussed at her family table, but not extensively. “My parents were centre-right, but their attention focused more on the Resistance; my father was a maquisard (freedom fighters against the Nazi occupation who were mostly operating in rural or mountainous areas, ed). He taught me that it’s important to take personal risks when you sense that something is wrong.”
In the Seventies, French politics transitioned from the post-Gaullist era to a more modern political landscape, with Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s liberal social reforms and François Mitterrand’s unification of socialists and communists. “I started studying at Sciences Po in 1980, one year before Mitterrand won the elections, and I remember these big discussions on a possible end of the Fifth Republic, with the Russian tanks rolling in Paris, should the government change color. I was just sixteen, still too young to vote, but I was following the debate.”
Loiseau’s involvement in politics started in August 1980, after the foundation of Solidarność, the trade union which played a central role in the end of communist rule in Poland. “The first time I went on a manifestation was to support these brave Polish people who were protesting against the dictatorship. That’s when I realised that the European project could not be completed without reaching those on the other side of the Iron Curtain.”
Exchange students were helping her complementing the news she was reading about Poland. “I was a young girl, from a public high school, while most of the students in Sciences Po were older men, from very selective private schools, with a lots of manners and arrogance. I found them very boring and that’s why I mostly befriended foreigners.”
Loiseau became then an activist in a pro-European student organization, though she didn’t join any political party. “Our goal was advocating student exchanges around Europe and we were so determined that we reached the office of President Mitterand. In a way, what we achieved was a precursor of Erasmus.”
Her desire to understand the world led her to study Mandarin Chinese and Indonesian. “At Sciences Po the professors were great but the atmosphere was boring, I wanted to spend some time out of it and that’s when I enrolled to Langues’O, the Institute for Oriental Languages and Civilizations. My Mandarin is very rusty, it only comes back to me if I am desperately lost in the metro of Beijing. But I still speak Indonesian today, it’s the secret language I use with my husband, who is French but he can also speak it.”
After she graduated, she worked shortly as press attaché for a fashion brand. “I didn’t have a real plan and I think I chose that partly to annoy my parents. It was fun at the beginning but I grew tired of that The Devil Wears Prada environment: competition was high and people were terrible. A dear cousin of mine, who was a diplomat, suggested me to apply to the foreign office, which was not an obvious choice for a woman back then. You needed to hear a man motivating you to take that step and my cousin had good arguments: ‘You did Sciences Po, you love to travel to unknown places and you speak many languages’.”
Loiseau started in 1988 as press officer in Paris, in the Asian directorate, soon getting involved in the Cambodian Peace Agrement, which was co-chaired by France and Indonesia. “There I learned how to deal with people who hate each other and also with people I don’t like at all, like the Khmer Rouge. And how to create the conditions to make those people work together.”
Another defining moment of her career was the Tiananmen Square protests (1989). “I had been to China many times, before the repression the society was quite open and I had many friends among the artists and the intellectuals. After Tienanmen many of them were arrested and I participated in the efforts of taking the dissidents out of mainland China. It was exciting when we succeded and extremely disturbing when we failed… I understood what a dictatorship is and I realised I couldn’t be posted in a country where being a friend of a foreign diplomat could lead you to prison.”
Suharto‘s Indonesia was not much better. “It was a bloody dictatorship too, it’s just we were not very well-informed, only when I was there I realized the level of repression his people had to endure. I was second-secretary of the French Embassy in Jakarta and we were still working on the Cambodian peace process. It was difficult, as a twenty-six years old single woman, to deal with all the generals. My trick was joining the charity events their wives organized; they loved me because I spoke the language and I tried my best to be friendly. So then they would ask their husbands: ‘How come you did not grant her an appointment yet?’.”
Loiseau drove a small Peugeot 205 in the insane traffic of Jakarta. “My car was my second home, I had food, I had books, I had clothes, because I could be stuck for hours in a traffic jam. And I also learned how to fool the dictatorship: every embassy had a man monitoring it, but I was lucky the one assigned to me was a Christian from Sumatra, so I could invite him for some wine and then he was so drunk he couldn’t follow me.”
In Jakarta, Nathalie met her husband Bertrand. “He was on civil service duties, working as scientific attaché at the Embassy. Later we discovered we lived 200 meters from each other in Paris but we never met.”
Nathalie, neé Ducoulombier, decided to take her husband’s surname, an uncommon choice for a feminist: “Why should I have my father’s surname? You don’t choose your father, but you choose your husband. Also my surname was very long and it didn’t feel very international.”
After Indonesia, Loiseau went back to Paris, working at the UN directorate and focussing on South America and East Africa. “It was a moment I believed the UN was ready to do something: France had the highest number of peacekeepers in the UN, the Cold War was over, there were no vetoes at all.”
Hard work paid off, in 1993 she was invited to join the staff of the Foreign Minister Alain Juppé and continue her diplomatic career. “Everybody was expecting I would pick Washington or some other fancy place but I decided to go to Senegal, also because my husband was working in development there. I had to relearn everything, as I was a specialist of Asia, that made me feel young again.”
Working in a former French colony was not always easy: “Colonialism was never brought up in any discussion with the local diplomats but that didn’t mean there weren’t strong feelings about it. In the first two weeks I had some difficulties, especially with my ambassador, who was quite old and still with a post-colonial mindset, he would only talk to the ruling party. I told him: ‘Tomorrow I have an appointment with the opposition party, if you ask me to cancel this I am out of here. And he agreed to let me go.'”
Loiseau spent four years in Senegal and she gave birth to three of her four children there. “Making them grow up there created a special bond with Senegal. I love the country, I still have lots of friends there, just this morning I was talking with one of them about the ruling that stripped Senegal of the African Cup…”
After Senegal, Loiseau landed in Washington in 2002, working as Director of Communication at the French Embassy. “I was still in Morocco, De Villepin, whom I’ve known for ages, came to me saying: ‘You remember I’ve been telling you many times that you should be a spokesperson in Washington, as I did some years ago? Well, now that I am the foreign minister this is not a suggestion anymore but an official request, be ready to fly to the US in three weeks’.”
In those days, the US were preparing the invasion of Iraq, which President Chirac and de Villepin strongly opposed. “We needed a change of staff, including a new ambassador, to oppose the neo-cons and deal with the fracture between France and the US. It was a very interesting time, because I had access to the most prominent journalists in DC; I was never in my office, I was always in theirs. Journalists knew a lot of things they were not allowed to write, because their publishers would not accept any criticism of the administration, everything had to be very patriotic after 9/11. They were so frustrated they would come to me and tell me what they knew.”
History has an interesting way of repeating itself, more often as a tragedy than as a farce. “Now when I bump into people from the Bush administration, who were the warmongers and the tough Republicans but not the kind you see in power now, they greet me and say: ‘Those were good days’. It looks like they forgot they were lying to the world to justify that war.”
The French elections of 2012, with socialist Holland defeating Sarkozy, changed the political landscape: “I was fired by the new foreign minister, Laurent Fabius; I was everything he didn’t like: I was a woman, under fifty, who had worked with the centre-right and who was not a former alumni of ENA”.
ENA, acronym of École nationale d’administration, was one of the most demanding grande école, responsible for educating and selecting the future civil servants. Its director is selected by a board and appointed by the French President. “After I was fired, I applied as director of ENA and I was the first choice of the selection committee. Hollande was already pissed with Fabius, because he fired one of the few female senior officials just for the pleasure of it. He didn’t know me but he asked about me and he appointed director, even if I was not an alumni of ENA. I think that was a plus, because they wanted someone to modernize and change things.”
ENA was closed in 2021 by President Macron, an ENA graduate himself, following the protests of the yellow vests movement, which saw it as a tool of the elite governing class. “Elite has the same etymology as elected, even far-right leaders who cry out against the elite are part of it. And I don’t think a state can work without technocrats. Can a hospital work without doctors? No, you need specialists. And learning how to turn political instructions into reality is very technical. Whether officials are properly trained or not, this is another question.”
A question that hits hard those struggling with the abstrusity of the EPSO competition. “I have nothing against meritocracy or excellency; the real question is which processes are in place to select the elite, to ensure that we have the right people for the job. When I was director of ENA, I introduced group oral exams, where candidates had to cooperate, compromise, convince and solve problems together. If you have an individual oral exam you end up selecting those who are best at promoting themselves.”
In 2016, Loiseau joined Macron’s presidential campaign against Le Pen. “My main motivation was that I didn’t want the far-right to win; I wanted to be able to look my children in the eyes, showing them I was doing my best for their future.”
In June 2017, Loiseau was appointed minister of EU affairs, following the resignation of Marielle de Sarnez. “Édouard Philippe called me first, I met him already once before, and I thought it was just a regular government meeting. I was quite surprised when he mentioned that Macron wanted to make me minister. We discussed the possibility but there wasn’t a clear decision.
Later, in the middle of the night, I heard my phone ringing. I usually switch it off, but I left it on because one of my kids was outside and he still had to call me. My husband, who was half asleep, told me: ‘Well, you’ll finally be happy to know your son is fine’ and after two more minutes he asked me: ‘Why are you calling your son Mr. President?’. Macron asked me to come to his office at eight the next morning and I of course agreed.”
Loiseau was chosen specifically for her political independence; asked whether parties are good for democracy or just a tool to administer power she has no doubts: “Parties, unions, NGOs are all necessary. The State needs to be organized, otherwise anybody can say: ‘I am the people’ and this is very dangerous. Of course, it doesn’t mean that one has to be in a political party to be picked as prime minister or that everything that goes through parties if good for the society.”
Being minister of EU affairs in 2017 meant dealing with the consequences of Brexit: “I worked together with Barnier on the negotiations. but I was still disappointed in Juncker about Brexit, he showed a lack of self-confidence in choosing not to communicate against it.”
A choice Juncker regretted heavily. But Brexit had at least one positive aspect: in march 2019 Loiseau reached world-wide fame, thanks to this post on her personal Facebook account:
I decided to call my cat Brexit: he wakes me up meowing like crazy every morning because he wants to go out, but as soon as I open the door, he just sits there undecided and then looks angry when I put him outside.
“One of my best friends, the journalist François Clemenceau, took that quote from my profile, without really asking my permission, and wrote a short article on Le Journal du Dimanche and that became viral. The Brits understood if was a joke but CNN called me to have a picture of my cat. Good for the Brits, you need sense of humour to deal with Brexit.”
Loiseau even had the questionable pleasure of a dinner with Boris Johnson: “He was in trouble in London: people said that Brexit was isolating him so, during a press conference, he invited himself to have dinner with the French EU minister. I found it weird, because I usually don’t decide the date and place when I want to see somebody, but I played along and extended the invitation to the French foreign minister. We talked about everything except Brexit, Johnson didn’t want to touch that argument, he just needed a photo op with some French ministers. Overall, If you forget that he was responsible for an entire country, I would say he was friendly and funny.”
As French Minister of EU Affairs, Loiseau was asked by President Macron to create the Citizens’ Consultations On Europe (ECCs), a predecessor of the Conference on the Future of Europe. “It was an attempt to listens to citizens without preaching them, something I really believe in. The Commission was not enthusiastic at all, not only they were not helping me, they were working against it. And it’s easy to blame it on Selmayr, but even commissioners like Timmermans, who said he loved the idea, were not really offering any tangible support.”
Loiseau spares no criticism to the institutional communication: “They keep filming and photographing buildings in Brussels… That sells dreams, I’m sure millions of Europeans can related to that. They always shows a video of somebody taking an Eurostar or opening a laptop… What does that even mean? This is what happens when people are paid without consequences if their work doesn’t succeed.”
As a MEP, Loiseau is very active on the Democracy Shield, a set of measures to protect EU elections from foreign interference; to no one’s surprise, she was recently attacked by Elon Musk himself. “That gave me a lot of visibility, my post reached millions. I don’t think it was really him commenting that, though I know he does post from time to time. In the weeks before, his army of trolls had been spreading fake news that I was paid by Soros, he is obsessed by him. But I am used to physical intimidation, so I don’t really care about what happens online.”
It was incredibly interesting to talk with such a formidable person and I couldn’t resist one last question:
You’re the first French MEP I interview, so I have to ask: “What do you think about commuting to Strasbourg?
Next question please!