“Honor and pride!”, She tweeted after her election to this key post, where with the President of the Assembly Yaël Braun-Pivet and five other vice-presidents, she will take turns in the delicate mission of chair the meetings. His baptism of fire is scheduled for Tuesday evening on a health text.
When she arrived at the Palais Bourbon in 2017, this smiling 45-year-old brunette with glasses often perched on her head felt “illegitimate”, she recently told France Inter. It was linked to her “surprise” victory against the RN in Meurthe-et-Moselle in the only duel in France which opposed the two parties and because she “did not know this world”. It took him “three years” to get comfortable.
Born in Verdun in the Meuse, this member of the left alliance Nupes was narrowly re-elected – again against the RN – with some 150 votes difference.
After having been a paramedic, telemarketer and still an executive assistant, Caroline Fiat passed the nursing assistant competition and practiced for ten years.
During the previous legislature, she often carried the voice of the working classes in the Assembly, sometimes being nicknamed “Bac -2”.
“If people have elected a caregiver to the National Assembly, it is so that the daily life of the people can be shouted in this hemicycle”, she said in 2017, then tirelessly defending caregivers “on the edge of the abyss” , with sometimes the voice broken by the emotion.
At the peak of the Covid crisis, she resumed her job as a nursing assistant in an intensive care unit in Nancy.
This mother of four children does not hesitate to rely on her experience, as when she told one by one in the hemicycle in 2021, during a debate on the right to abortion, her pregnancies sometimes “not programmed”.
– “People’s deputy” –
“Like the other rebellious, it is an uncompromising, frontal profile,” said her colleague Ugo Bernalicis (LFI). “At the same time, it is the one among us who has despite everything managed to maintain links with elected officials of different sensitivities. She is sociable, she discusses with people beyond the divisions, I am less able to do it”, he smiled.
Maxime Minot (LR) for example thanked her at the start of the year for a “beautiful friendship”.
The communist Pierre Dharréville, who rubbed shoulders with her in the Social Affairs Committee, sees in her “someone who is very endearing”. He is “one of the figures who have given deputies the image of deputies of the people”, he adds.
At the other end of the spectrum, Sébastien Chenu (RN) greets a “serious” MP who “has no problem” talking to everyone. “I think she gets things wrong a lot, but she does it with sincerity,” he says.
He tells a “funny anecdote”, which he attended with RN Bruno Bilde at the bar, when Caroline Fiat launched to the latter: “We were married in the past”.
In front of his puzzled look, she explained that they had been in the same high school in Lorraine and husband and wife in a play, a moment which “broke down the wall of ideological separation”.
Since then, when they pass each other in the hallways, they say “hello fascists!” and “hello commies!”, Reports the elected RN.
In the ranks of the majority, opinions are more nuanced. An elected LREM believes that Caroline Fiat is “in the exacerbation of evils”. Even if “she has very touching, very sincere sides”, another invokes a fragility.
For Sébastien Chenu, also elected vice-president, “it is the function that makes the man or the woman” and “it should not be underestimated”.
“It’s not serious: she is absolutely not fragile, she is a fighter”, retorts for his part Pierre Dharréville.
