Valls seeks ‘reconciliation’ in bid for French presidency

French prime minister Manuel Valls called his candidacy for the presidency of France "that of reconciliation" in a 20-minute speech in the Paris suburb of Evry on Monday night.

“Yes, I am a candidate for the presidency of the republic,” Valls said to applause and cheers, standing before a multi-racial crowd. His clunky campaign slogan, “Make everything that brings us together win”, was printed on the lectern. Valls used the verb “rassembler” or “bring together” repeatedly.

“I have this strength in me, this will to serve my country. It is beyond words. It is a total conviction. I want to give everything, everything, for France which gave everything to me,” Valls said.

Valls will step down as prime minister on Tuesday morning and president François Hollande will appoint a caretaker government for his last five months in office.

“I do not want France to again live through the trauma of the extreme right making it to the run-off,” Valls said, adding that Marine Le Pen’s Front National is “at the gates of power”.

Divisions on the left

Alluding to Les Républicains (LR) nominee François Fillon, he promised “to fight against the right’s old recipes from the 1980s”.

Valls said he was “in revolt against the idea that the left will be eliminated [in the first round of the presidential election]. I see the divisions on the left. How long are we going to be subjected to this theatre?”

Nothing is pre-determined, Valls repeated at the end of his speech: “We are told that the left has no chance . . . that François Fillon is already president of the republic. Nothing is written.”

Valls was born in Barcelona in 1962, to a Catalan artist who opposed Franco and an Italian mother. He grew up in the fashionable Marais district of Paris and became a naturalised French citizen at age 20. His second wife, the concert violinist Anne Gravoin, attended his speech on Monday night.

Some socialists consider Valls a traitor for having put pressure on Hollande not to seek re-election. He reiterated “the warmth of my feelings” towards Hollande on Monday night.

Other candidates are already using Hollande’s record in office to attack Valls, who has served as Hollande’s prime minister since April 2014.

Valls's path to the Élysée will not be easy. The socialist party (PS) is in a shambles, with only 42,300 dues-paying members, according to the Canard enchaîné. Turnout for the January 22nd-29th primary is unlikely to surpass several hundred thousand, compared with 4.3 million for the LR primary last month.

Left-wing voters

A poll published by the Journal du Dimanche on Sunday showed 45 per cent of left-wing voters would like Valls to be the socialist nominee, compared to 25 per cent for the former economy minister Arnaud Montebourg. Yet no poll shows him surviving to the presidential runoff on May 7th.

Many on the left are wary of Valls, for having spoken of “two, irreconcilable lefts” in France. “Yes, there are two lefts in France and one of them has become right-wing”, the former PS leader Martine Aubry said on Monday.

In his declaration of candidacy, Valls admitted to having used “harsh words” and “provoking controversy”, but said that debate was a characteristic of the left. Years ago, Valls angered Aubry by suggesting that the name of the party should be changed.

Unlike the former economy minister Emmanuel Macron, who is standing as an independent, Valls is not yet able or willing to turn his back on the PS.

More orthodox socialists reproach Valls for having criticised the 35-hour working week, and for his hard line against the Roma when he was interior minister for the first two years of Hollande’s term. “The vocation of the Roma is to return to Romania or Bulgaria,” he said. He has been equally unsympathetic to refugees in the migrant crisis.

Valls and Hollande’s liberal economic policies led Montebourg and former education minister Benoît Hamon to leave the Valls government in August 2014. Shortly thereafter, Valls proclaimed, “I love business! I love business!” before the business management group MEDEF.

Unpopular economic reforms

More recently, Valls was severely criticised by the left for passing unpopular economic reforms by decree.

“It is not possible to put a social-liberal candidate up against the ultra-liberal François Fillon,” Montebourg says.

Valls hopes French voters will be so fearful of Fillon’s “ultra-liberal” policies that they will vote for his promise to “modernise but preserve the French social model”.

Valls has spoken repeatedly of “Islamist totalitarianism” and says the Muslim headscarf represents “the enslavement of women”.

His brusque manner may prove his greatest handicap. Retired MEP Daniel Cohn-Bendit on Monday said that “Manuel Valls should pay attention to what happened to [the outgoing Italian prime minister] Matteo Renzi, who also tried to be a tough guy. It’s not enough to be intelligent; you have to win people over.”