The French National Assembly has elected Yaël Braun-Pivet as its president, equivalent to a Speaker of the House, in the opening session of its 16th Legislature, reeports FRANCE 24.
Braun-Pivet, a 51-year-old member of Emmanuel Macron's Renaissance party, will be the first woman ever to hold the position in France, a mark of progress despite waning parity in the lower-house chamber.
Braun-Pivet's election to the speaker's chair follows the naming last month of Élisabeth Borne, the second woman to serve as French prime minister and the first in three decades. The promotions are cause for applause in France, still lagging on gender parity not least on the benches of the National Assembly despite laws meant to narrow the gap. But amid overlapping global crises, with French politics in unprecedented flux and Macron in a quandary for lack of an absolute legislative majority, some detect the Glass Cliff Effect: when all else fails, let a woman try to fix it – at her peril.
Born in Nancy, eastern France, in 1970, the granddaughter of Eastern European Jews who settled in France in the 1930s to escape anti-Semitism at home, Braun-Pivet is a criminal lawyer by trade. She built her legal career in the Paris area before pausing it in her mid-30s to follow her husband, an executive with the French cosmetics giant L'Oréal, to Taiwan and Japan, where the two youngest of the couple's five children were born.
Returning to France with her family in 2012 after seven years abroad, Braun-Pivet would transition to nonprofit work. She opened a Resto du Coeur soup kitchen and set up free legal help to fight social exclusion in suburban Paris.
Braun-Pivet has said she had always voted for France's Socialist Party before opting in 2016 for Macron's fledgling En Marche, a centrist political movement that pledged to get beyond the old left-right divide, do politics differently and tap into civil-society talent. "Getting beyond? I was experiencing that every day at the Restos, with volunteers from very different worlds, folks very left-wing, others very right-wing," she told the left-leaning daily Libération earlier this year.
Braun-Pivet threw her hat in the ring for a legislative seat in suburban Paris in 2017 and won, part of Macron's comfortable first-term absolute majority in the National Assembly. She was quickly elected president of the chamber's Committee of Laws, a lofty position unheard of for a neophyte legislator, beating out more experienced male candidates.
As a committee chair under the spotlight, Braun-Pivet has herself admitted to a halting start, when she was tagged an amateur by veteran colleagues. She caught flak in the summer of 2018 amid a probe over the so-called Benalla Affair, named for the Élysée Palace staffer Alexandre Benalla, caught on camera roughing up demonstrators at a May Day rally. Refusing to summon close Macron associates to testify before the Committee of Laws, Braun-Pivet was accused of "protecting" the president's office.