Laurence Tubiana, a climate diplomat at the heart of the standoff on the left for Matignon

She defines herself as a "woman of the left and environmentalist", but will this climate diplomat, aged 73, achieve the feat of uniting the New Popular Front behind her?

"She is a diplomat committed to both the ecological and social fields", who has "never compromised with her convictions", underlined Tuesday Olivier Faure, the head of the Socialist Party at the origin of the proposal of his candidacy as Prime Minister, an option supported by environmentalists and communists.

But La France insoumise sees in this linchpin of the COP21 – the UN conference which gave birth to the Paris climate agreement – ​​a profile likely to bring “the Macronists back through the window” into the government, says LFI coordinator Manuel Bompard.

On July 11, Laurence Tubiana co-signed a column in Le Monde urging the NFP to "without delay reach out to other actors on the Republican front to discuss a Republican emergency program."

And many recall that her name was circulating in macronie in 2020 for the Ministry of Ecological Transition... A hypothesis that she herself had rejected in advance: "I no longer believe in the policy of small steps".

Very well known and respected in the environmental sphere but also in economic and diplomatic circles, this economist has already acted alongside the left in the past.

“Flexibility and confidence”

In 1997, she joined the cabinet of socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, as an advisor on sustainable development, diving into the negotiations of the Kyoto protocol.

Fifteen years later, in 2013, it was also she who facilitated the national debate desired by President François Hollande to outline the future of energy in France, with participants as diverse as unions, NGOs, elected officials and Medef.

But Laurence Tubiana's major work remains above all the complex construction of a compromise around the Paris climate agreement.

She devoted two years of her life to these historic negotiations, traveling the planet to develop a text with sometimes obscure language but capable of collecting the signatures of both China and the United States.

Objective: "to push each country to do better", then explained the one that everyone calls "Laurence", a little woman with silver hair and an easy smile, who if necessary also knows not to mince her words.

“She embodies a balance between flexibility and confidence,” noted Christiana Figueres, then UN climate manager, pointing to her “unique CV”: “an academic, who understood climate science and did enough economic research to anticipate the transformations to come; and who worked for governments".

The climate, and its corollary - the energy question - Laurence Tubiana came to it "naturally" through her research on agriculture and development, says the person concerned, who also created an NGO, Solagral, and a research institute, l 'Iddri (Institute of Development and International Relations).

“Society project”

An assertive intellectual, with a perfect command of English, professor at Columbia and Sciences Po, Laurence Tubiana likes politics “but in a certain way”.

Particularly when it comes to international issues, specifies the university, born in Oran (Algeria), of a lawyer father who worked in tobacco and cinema and a mother who imported Scandinavian furniture.

Her resolute action in the fight against climate change will be extended in 2020 to “ordinary” citizens with the Citizens’ Climate Convention, which she co-organized. An unprecedented political experience which, according to her, leads to a "real social project", but of which she criticizes the very partial takeover by Emmanuel Macron's government.

The expert has also been a member since its creation in 2019 of the High Council for the Climate (HCC), an independent body responsible for evaluating France's climate policies.