“I have tears in my eyes,” said Edwige Diaz when the results of the first round of the legislative elections were announced on Sunday, June 30. With 53.33% of the vote, a single round was enough for her to regain her seat as MP for Blayais. She needed two in 2022 to become the very first RN MP for Gironde. A historically left-wing land that, for a long time, believed itself to be impenetrable to the far right.
And it is no coincidence that she made Blayais her stronghold in the mid-2010s. A former bastion of a “madrellie” (1) in its twilight years. A rural constituency, marked by poverty, more than an hour’s drive from Bordeaux, when there is traffic: “The RN is the only party interested in our countryside,” she repeats ad nauseam.
She has woven her web, built up her ball of wool, years of meticulous work that have paid off. At 36, she is the only MP from the region elected in the first round. In her service record, she has the advantage of having been one of the vanguards of the Le Pen party’s conquest of the west.
Diaz Generation
She describes attending a Marine Le Pen meeting in 2014 in Corrèze for the European elections: “Goosebumps, tears in my eyes, I said to myself: ‘This is what you want to do, so go for it'”, she explained to “Sud Ouest” in 2022. She entered the RN, found in Jacques Colombier, a historic figure of the FN, close to Jean-Marie Le Pen, a chaperone. First election in 2015, to the Region. The following year, she succeeded her mentor at the head of the movement in Gironde. She went “pro”. And intends to transform a mission land into an election land, to make Haute Gironde a “laboratory of the right”.
She never misses a single election: legislative, municipal. She stumbles, but sees her scores increase. In 2021, she leads the regional list and gets 26 elected officials elected. A pool from which she will draw the new heads of the party. A “Diaz generation” is emerging, like Julie Rechagneux, elected in the last European elections. “We work like the parties did: training activists and elected officials, we show off, we don’t miss an election.” A method that Edwige Diaz applies to herself: inauguration, official demonstration, she doesn’t miss a thing.
“We work like the parties did: training activists and elected officials, we work hard, we don’t miss an election.”
An activism that opens the doors to the RN’s Olympus: the executive office. Her first election to the deputation in 2022 propels her to vice-president of the RN in charge of federations. There, she declines the method modeled in Gironde, where she hopes to win between five and six seats of deputies on Sunday July 7.
An achievement for the MP, who is classified in the party’s “soldier monk” profiles for whom, in both words and attire, nothing is out of place. The welcoming face of a hard line that focuses on the triptych: immigration, insecurity, purchasing power. Recently, it was her that the RN dispatched to a major continuous news channel to defuse the controversy over the ban on strategic positions for dual nationals: “An anecdotal announcement,” she brushed aside.
(1) Reference to Philippe Madrelle, native of Haute Gironde, president of the Gironde Department between 1988 and 2015.
