Marine Tondelier, leader of the ecologists and candidate in the 2027 presidential election, announced on Monday that she is three months pregnant, calling it “a miracle baby” after a miscarriage and unsuccessful fertility treatments. “I am going through a contrasting period. Difficult in terms of politics, but very happy on a personal level, as I am expecting a child, news that fills me with joy, even though it caught me off guard,” explained Marine Tondelier, already a mother to a son, in an interview with Elle magazine published on Monday. “A pregnant campaign, it was challenging,” confessed the 39-year-old secretary general of the ecologists, after the municipal elections. “It is also a relief to announce my pregnancy today. Since January, I felt like I was leading a double life.”
The ecologist candidate for the left-wing primary revealed that she became pregnant for the first time after being elected national secretary of the Greens in 2022, but experienced a miscarriage after a few weeks. “I did not expect it at all, and it was a very violent moment, which I hardly talked about to anyone, not even my family to avoid making people sad,” she said.
A few months later, she and her partner started a medically assisted procreation journey. “Like many others, we faced multiple failures in fertility treatments, and we were offered IVF. I started the treatment the week following the dissolution of 2024 and got pregnant again. But I had the shock of learning at the first ultrasound that the pregnancy would not progress. I went through very difficult weeks,” she shared. “With my partner, after several failures, we eventually put the project on hold. And then, a few months later, I became pregnant again… A ‘miracle baby’, as they say,” she confided. “When I had my dating ultrasound, I was told that the conception took place on December 25th, you can’t make that up! This means there is hope for all those facing failure, and I want to tell them: you are not alone,” she added.
Asked about what needs to be improved in terms of fertility treatments, Marine Tondelier advocated for the possibility to analyze embryos before insemination, within a well-defined framework, as is done in many other European countries but is prohibited in France. “This would help avoid a form of insistence to implant non-viable embryos,” she noted, pointing out that a large part of infertility cases are due to embryo abnormalities, which are often chromosomal.
Internal turbulence within the ecologists
The political leader is facing internal criticism within her party, where a minority faction is calling for a Federal Council meeting to assess the “heavy defeat” in the municipal elections. In a statement released on Monday, this faction named “Make Ecology Win,” led by MP Jérémie Iordanoff, lamented the lack of accountability following the “catastrophic score” in the 2024 European elections and the absence of reflection after the “heavy defeat” in the municipal elections. They also regretted the hasty process of designating an ecologist candidate for the left-wing primary, criticizing the lack of consideration for priorities. Marine Tondelier won the internal Green primary in December (with 86% of the votes) to represent her party in the left-wing primary for the 2027 presidential election.
This faction is calling for an “urgent need” to conduct a “real assessment” of these municipal elections, and more broadly of the ecologists’ political conduct over the past two years, to make strategic decisions ahead of the presidential and legislative elections of 2027, urging the prompt convocation of an “extraordinary Federal Council.”
