On September 16, Marine Tondelier, the ecological candidate in the French presidential election, addressed criticism she faced after a televised segment on LCI. During a program on September 7, she was asked to provide one-word assessments of several former French presidents, including Georges Pompidou and Valéry Giscard d'Estaing. The segment, intended to showcase her views on past leaders, was widely shared and mocked on social media, with many finding her responses unclear or unprepared. In a radio interview with France Inter on September 16, Tondelier explained that she had not been adequately prepared for the exercise. She clarified that she was asked to summarize her opinions on presidents from the time she was alive, such as Jacques Chirac, whom she has personal memories of. "If I had been asked about Pompidou’s legacy, I could have talked about industrialization and its impact on France," she said, defending her knowledge and rejecting claims that she was uninformed. Tondelier criticized the way the clip had gone viral, noting that it was shared on social networks, particularly X (formerly Twitter), where she believes the platform favors content that is more aligned with far-right perspectives. She pointed out that the clip was amplified by various media outlets, including CNews, JDD, and Paris Match. She argued that the context of the 1h15 show was lost in the viral excerpt. She also pointed out the unfairness of asking younger politicians to evaluate older presidents, whom they had not lived through. "Ask Jean-Luc Mélenchon to summarize the presidency of Albert Lebrun, a president who was born 12 years before him," she said, highlighting what she sees as an elitist and dismissive approach in French political discourse. Tondelier announced she would publish a detailed analysis of the incident this weekend, which she claims reveals much about the current state of French politics.