French ex-chambermaid runs for MP after labour battle

DETERMINED: Rachel Keke

Former chambermaid Rachel Keke took on her employers and won a gruelling battle for better working conditions in the Paris hotel where she cleaned. Now she’s running to be an MP. Keke, 48, will run on a ticket for a new left-wing alliance in France’s parliamentary polls in June. She faces French President Emmanuel Macron’s former sports minister, Roxana Maracineanu, in the fight for a seat in the southeastern Paris suburbs. “I will beat her. She doesn’t live here. She’s not from the working-class suburbs,” Keke told AFP as she campaigned in the district of Chevilly-Larue on the outskirts of the capital. “What are you coming here for?,” Keke said, as if addressing her rival. “We are the ones who live in deprived areas and do key jobs. We are the ones who are held in contempt and are exploited. So let us defend ourselves in parliament.” Centrist Macron is seeking a legislative majority to push through his domestic agenda following his re-election in April. The left-wing alliance, made up of new faces such as Keke’s, threatens to block his programme. Keke was one of around 20 chambermaids — most originally from sub-Saharan Africa — who defied their employers at an Ibis hotel in northwestern Paris to demand better pay and working conditions. Nearly two years later, in May 2021, the fight against global hotel giant Accor, which owns the Ibis brand, ended in victory. They won a pay increase of between €250 and 500 ($270-540) per month.‘Leader of the masses’ MPs from the far-left France Unbowed (LFI) party supported the women throughout the campaign, leading Keke to campaign for them during the presidential election. But running for MP was not part of her plans, until local LFI official Hadi Issahnane suggested it to her. “We’re not far from her being a symbol of our political struggle — quite literally. She naturally embodies it,” Issahnane told AFP. LFI MP Eric Coquerel said Keke “has something magnetic about her”. “She’s strong, she finds the right words and doesn’t need to read from cues when she speaks”. “She’s what I call a leader of the masses,” he added. Keke was born in Ivory Coast. Her mother who sold clothes and her father was a bus driver. After her mother died when she was 12, she looked after her brothers and sisters. The mother-of-five arrived in France, aged 26, in 2000. “I love France,” Keke said, recalling the stories she heard as a child about her grandfather, who fought in World War II in the southwestern French city of Pau. Keke started off as a hairdresser before becoming a hotel cleaning lady. “After my first day I came home aching all over. It was as if I’d been hit everywhere. It was really hard,” she said. Cleaning is a job that “destroys the body”, she said.‘Symbolic importance’ LFI leader Jean-Luc Melenchon emerged as the dominant force on the left in April’s presidential election. He missed out on the run-off vote against Macron by a whisker, beaten into third place by far-right candidate Marine Le Pen. After Macron’s win, Melenchon immediately urged voters to hand the left a parliamentary majority to block the president’s pro-business reforms. He himself is seeking to become prime minister. Part of Melenchon’s strategy is to push forward new faces such as Keke — a candidate of “symbolic importance”, according to Emeric Brehier, a former Socialist lawmaker now with the Fondation Jean-Jaures think-tank. “The left are saying, ‘We represent the real working classes and we have representatives of these classes,’” Brehier told AFP. Stephane Ravacley, a baker who went on hunger strike in eastern France to protest at the planned deportation of his young Guinean apprentice, is also running on the left-wing ticket. Recent opinion polls show the presidential majority and the left-wing alliance are neck-and-neck in the popular vote. But the two-stage election — the first round on June 12 and run-offs on June 19 — and the fact the LFI’s popularity is concentrated in specific geographic areas, suggest Macron’s bloc is likely to retain a majority in parliament. Keke said she was not afraid of being surrounded by professional politicians, mostly from a different social class. “People know the status of a chambermaid. They know I don’t have a Master’s degree,” she said. “If I’m asked a question I don’t understand, I won’t answer. The media need to get used to it.”