Claire Thoury, an activist and community leader at the head of the CESE

"The CESE is an institution that has no right to be afraid, afraid to reform itself, and will take its full part in the public debate," she declared in the Council chamber, before being elected with 97 votes out of 173.

After a thesis on "student engagement in a world of individualization", Claire Thoury was from 2017 to 2021 general delegate of the network of student associations Animafac before being elected president of the Mouvement associatif, which federates more than 600.000 associations.

A member of the CESE since 2021 as a representative of associations, she was appointed the following year to head the governance committee of the citizens' convention for the end of life.

Her talent for bringing together people with distant, even antagonistic, ideas, without abandoning strong convictions, is unanimously praised by those with whom this 36-year-old woman works or has collaborated in the past.

"She is someone who is very, very intelligent, very close to others, who has a very strong capacity for work and engagement, which undoubtedly comes from her involvement in associations," commented former CFDT leader Laurent Berger to AFP, who took Claire Thoury on as a social expert in his team at the Mutual Institute for the Environment and Solidarity within Crédit Mutuel.

"In listening"

"What she has as a talent is that she has real convictions, but she listens, she debates, she understands the arguments of the other, so for the CESE, she is the ideal candidate," praises Mr. Berger, who knew her when she was in charge of Animafac.

Claire Thoury has "a lot of energy, a significant work ethic and a lot of conviction", also assures Christophe Robert, general delegate of the Foundation for the Housing of the Disadvantaged (formerly the Abbé Pierre Foundation), who has been working alongside her since 2019 within the Pact for the Power to Live, a collective of associations and unions united to promote "a new societal project".

This sociologist by training, like her, adds that beyond her ability to understand the functioning of public policies and civil society, she also knows how to "bring it to life in a concrete way" as she was able to show by leading the Citizens' Convention for the end of life, by "trusting people, training them, and bringing them different points of view on the subject".

Claire Thoury grew up near Cavaillon, in the south of France, with a mother who was a medical secretary and now retired, and a father who worked in construction.

While still a student, she began working at Paris City Hall as an intern, then as a project manager and finally as a research and university advisor to Jean-Louis Missika, the deputy mayor in charge of higher education.

"She was brilliant, she was very calm" with "a lack of desire to promote herself which was positive," recalls Mr. Missika, who adds that she "was already interested, at the time, in participatory democracy" while the Paris City Hall was also "very focused on this, on the ability to involve students and teachers in collective decisions."