French prime minister heralds ‘new stage’ in Hollande presidency

Manuel Valls had to shout to be heard above the booing and heckling from opposition benches, which continued throughout the new French prime minister's 47-minute general policy speech in the National Assembly yesterday.

The right are feeling strong since they drubbed the socialists in last month’s municipal elections. But despite their best efforts to unnerve Valls, he passed the first test of his premiership with flying colours, proving himself to be a better orator than President François Hollande.

Hollande had no choice but to appoint Valls, who was the only popular minister in the previous government. But it was a perilous move. If Valls fails, the country is slated for three years of stagnation. If Valls succeeds, he could usurp Hollande as the socialists’ choice for presidential candidate in 2017.

Valls made “truth”, “efficacy” and “confidence” the watchwords of his policy address, which was clear, concise and filled with detail on how he will help businesses and struggling households.

Although he paid tribute to his predecessor, Jean-Marc Ayrault, Ayrault’s and Hollande’s failure was implicit in Valls’s judgment that “too much suffering, not enough hope – that is the situation of France”.

The president had “heard the message” of French voters’ “disappointment, discontent …anger …fear of the future …exaspertion”, Valls said. That was why he was asked “to open a new stage” in Hollande’s presidency.

Ambiguity
Hollande's ambiguity is perhaps his greatest failing. Yesterday, Valls promised to tell it straight. The words of politicians "have become a dead language", Valls said.

The opposition benches stopped their ruckus and joined in applause three times: when Valls paid homage to French soldiers in Mali and Central Africa; when he denounced the Rwandan president Paul Kagame for "letting it be thought that France could have been an accomplice to genocide"; and when he evoked Jean-Louis Borloo, the centrist politician who has withdrawn from political life due to illness.

In the run-up to Valls’s speech, some 80 left-wing and green parliamentarians threatened to withhold their vote of confidence. He won them over with a new “solidarity pact” that will reduce taxes for those in the lowest bracket by €5 billion in 2017.

Valls won the vote of confidence by 306 votes to 239. But he’s bound to confront the left of the left again. Valls is often called the “socialist Sarkozy” because he’s an economic liberal who is tough on the Roma and law and order issues. Justice minister Christiane Taubira, with whom he clashed over prison reform, did not attend his speech.

Valls said French business “must be protected” in competitive, globalised markets. He elaborated on tax relief through the €35 billion “pact of responsibility”which Hollande announced on January 14th. “We need our businesses, all our businesses, our SMEs, our start-ups, our artisans…” Valls said.

The prime minister called his plan to do away with all social security charges paid by employers for minimum wage-earners from January 2015 “a real revolution”. He promised to reduce corporate tax and to do away with “dozens of complex, little, low-yield taxes”.

If Paris is to comply with Brussels’s demand that deficit spending be capped at 3 per cent of GDP, it will have to cut €50 billion in government spending by 2017. Proportionally, Ireland made an adjustment five times greater, but the cuts have seemed impossible in France. Valls said he will cut €19 billion in state spending, €10 billion from medical insurance and €10 billion from local governments. He promised to attack the “territorial millefeuille” by halving the number of regions.

Valls concluded with a lyrical flight of praise for his adopted country. "France… is the arrogance of believing that what we do here is good for the rest of the world," he said.

'French arrogance'
"The famous 'French arrogance' that our neighbours often attribute to us is in fact the immense generosity of a country that wants to surpass itself.

“France has the same grandeur that she had in my eyes as a child,” he continued. Valls’s father is a painter from Catalonia, his mother Swiss-Italian. He became a naturalised French citizen at age 20. “That is why I wanted to become French,” he said. “That is why I wanted to be prime minister.”