Manuel Valls: man on a mission to save the French left

Prime Minister Manuel Valls has a reputation for never ducking a fight. But France’s former top cop may be about to embark on his biggest battle yet.
All eyes are on the Spanish-born premier after President Francois Hollande on Thursday took the country by surprise by saying he would bow out after a single tumultuous term rather than face possible humiliation at the polls.
Valls, a former interior minister, had been waiting in the wings but was showing increasing signs of impatience.
In a newspaper interview last weekend he had left open the possibility of challenging Hollande in a left-wing primary in January He said the explosive revelations contained in a book of interviews with the president had “plunged the left into total disarray”.
The ambitious 54-year-old said he wanted to “dispel the notion that defeat is inevitable” for the Socialists.
“I’m preparing for it. I’m ready,” he said, referring to the primary.
But he faces an uphill battle to put a winning spin on his two-and-a-half-year stint as Hollande’s right-hand man.
Unemployment remains stuck at around 10 percent and growth rates have barely budged.
Among leftists, his use of decrees to ram contested labour reforms through parliament and a failed proposal to strip dual-national terrorists of their French citizenship have alienated many voters.
Valls makes no apologies for slaying the holy cows of the left.
“The left could die,” he has warned, describing the emergence of two “irreconcilable” factions — one pragmatic and open to reforms, the other wedded to the class struggle.
Valls is a favourite to win the Socialist-organised primary but polls show him trailing in the first round of the election in April behind conservative candidate Francois Fillon and far-right leader Marine Le Pen.
They would be followed by centrist former economy minister Emmanuel Macron and firebrand Communist-backed Jean-Luc Melenchon, polls show.
Five years ago, Valls was a rank outsider for the Socialist nomination, winning only 5.6 percent on a platform seen as too economically liberal.
He became a spokesman for Hollande’s campaign and was rewarded when the Socialist won power with the post of interior minister.
Valls’ tough talking on crime made the clench-jawed minister every right-wing voter’s favourite leftist.
In 2014, he was promoted to premier with a mandate to rein in a group of unruly ministers that were undermining Hollande’s authority.
“A boss must know how to be the boss. I’m the boss,” he said at the time.
Within months he had a rival for the title of reformer-in-chief, in telegenic banker-turned-economy minister Macron.
Hollande’s protege walked out on the government two years later to further his own presidential ambitions — infuriating Valls who accused him of “destroying the left”.
Valls himself drew criticism meanwhile for his stern line on Islam and its co-existence with France’s secular values in the wake of a series of jihadist attacks.
In August, he waded into the debate on the Islamic “burkini”, declaring the full-body swimsuit “not compatible” with French values.
But he has also spoken out about the failure of France to live up to its egalitarian ideals, deploring the “spatial, social and ethnic apartheid” that traps immigrant families in grim high-rise suburbs.
“He says things with a certain honesty, a certain clearness, and yes, sometimes a certain roughness,” Alain Bauer, a prominent French criminologist and friend of Valls since their student days, told AFP.
Born in Barcelona, Valls and his family fled Franco’s dictatorship to France when he was a teenager.
“I am the son of a Spanish painter and a Swiss-Italian mother who chose France for its beauty, its grandeur and its warmth,” he said in his official biography.
At the age of 20 he gained French citizenship and soon immersed himself in politics.
Unlike Hollande and many other members of the French political elite, however, he did not attend the prestigious ENA school of administration, studying history instead.
In 2001, he became mayor of the tough multi-cultural Paris suburb of Evry and was elected to the National Assembly a year later.
Valls has four children from his first marriage to a teacher. He remarried in 2010, to Anne Gravoin, a professional violinist.