"I am a numbers person"

Politics plays a major role in the Kemp family. After talking to her younger sister Martine during the European elections, who replaced Christophe Hansen in the European Parliament in December when he moved from the European Parliament to the European Commission, this time we dropped in on Françoise Kemp.

The latter replaced Georges Mischo in the Chamber of Deputies after the elections on 8 October 2023, when he became a minister. She has also been an opposition councillor on the Dudelange municipal council since 2022 and has headed the CSV General Secretariat together with Alex Donnersbach since March last year.

The Co-Secretary General welcomes us on a sunny afternoon in her office, which used to be the president's office and where we have already spoken to Marc Spautz, Frank Engel and Claude Wiseler in previous years (we met Elisabeth Margue in another room). However, the current party chairman Luc Frieden probably doesn't need the office at number 4 of the Rue d l'Eau anyway, as his workplace in the Ministry of State is only a few metres away, where he certainly has a much more prestigious office.

Small talk is not her thing, as Françoise Kemp herself admits, as she is a mathematician and doctor of biomedicine. "I'm a numbers person. A person who is extremely rational, simply because structural thinking was instilled in me during my studies. Even as a politician, I never give long answers. You have a message that you want to get across and that's it. I have that in common with Martine Deprez, who is also a mathematician. You get to the heart of the matter. That's what sets you apart from people who have studied something other than maths. In maths, there is only right or wrong. You know that you don't have to go on forever. The answer is always the same."