The Ecologists’ congress ended with a setback for Marine Tondelier. Grenoble mayor Eric Piolle was elected party spokesperson on Saturday, April 26, after a second round of internal voting in which he beat Guillaume Hédouin, a regional councilor from Normandy endorsed by the party’s national secretary. The elected representative from Isère received 2,607 votes, compared to 2,306 for his opponent, according to the results announced at the nomination convention that closed the party’s 2025 congress. Re-elected party leader on April 19 with 73% of the vote, Marine Tondelier had expressly invited members to choose Guillaume Hédouin, even stating that it was the “most strategic vote of this congress” and that a victory for her protégé would send a strong “signal.” She had ousted Eric Piolle from her congress list this winter, telling him she preferred a profile “from a rural background.”
Opponents of the Hénin-Beaumont municipal councilor, for their part, denounced a desire to push the Ecologists’ media personalities out of the spotlight, to better occupy it herself. “Marine Tondelier wants to remain the only well-known figure in the party,” Eric Piolle denounced in March. On Friday, Green Party MP Sandrine Rousseau denounced “a form of concentration of power, personification, and lack of countervailing power.”
