Self-styled Socialist strongman has been gearing up for weeks and, with Hollande out of the running, now has his chance

François Hollande’s dramatic announcement that he will not seek a second term as France’s president has opened the way for the Socialist prime minister, Manuel Valls, to to mount a bid.



Valls is expected to swiftly throw his hat into the ring to become the Socialist presidential candidate and perhaps resign as prime minister in order to campaign for the party’s primary vote, to be held at the end of January.

The fiery, self-styled law-and-order strongman, who helped craft Hollande’s pro-business reformist line, had for days been pressuring the deeply unpopular Hollande to give up his doomed dream of re-election.

On a visit to the eastern city of Nancy on Friday, Valls praised Hollande’s “statesmanlike” decision to bow out and vowed to personally defend Hollande’s record in office. He said: “The president has my complete respect and affection.”



Valls has for months been suggesting that the bitterly divided French Socialist party could prove wrong the bleak predictions that it had no hope of even making it through to the final round of next spring’s election.

The presidential vote is looking highly unpredictable and Valls’s own prospects are far from clear-cut.

One flash poll by Harris International after Hollande said he would not run, showed Valls as favourite to win the Socialist primary race against the staunchly leftwing former economy minister Arnaud Montebourg.

But surprise Socialist candidates could yet emerge before the 15 December deadline. The former justice minister and a figure from French Guianese politics, Christiane Taubira, is being petitioned to run but has not commented. Hollande’s former partner Ségolène Royal, who was beaten in the 2007 presidential election, has been suggested by some, but appeared to brush aside the idea.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Christiane Taubira has been petitioned to run but has not commented. Photograph: Stephane Mahe/Reuters

The Socialists are also under pressure from outsiders on the left. Emmanuel Macron, the rebellious former economy minister who is running a maverick, outsider centrist bid has already begun to garner support from some Hollande loyalists. Both he and the hard-left firebrand Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who has the support of the Communist party, are polling higher than the Socialists. Polls show Valls currently at only 11% in the presidential polls.

Valls, 54, has been gearing up for weeks for a possible bid, making grand speeches trying to reposition himself at the heart of the Socialist party. But he has always been firmly on the party’s right, sometimes causing controversy with a pro-business, economically liberal and unorthodox socialist politics which saw his approach likened to Tony Blair’s.

Valls was born in Barcelona, the son of a bourgeois Catalan painter and a Swiss-Italian mother. His family later fled Spain’s Franco regime and Valls was granted French nationality at 20. He often refers to his utter devotion to the French republic that welcomed him. Having grown up in an artists’ studio surrounded by paintings, he has been careful to portray himself as someone who was also hardened by personal adversity and family challenges – his younger sister was a longtime heroin addict who credits him with helping her eventually quit and supporting her now she is HIV positive.

Valls joined the Socialist party aged 18, and progressed up the ranks in local politics on the outskirts of Paris, where inequality was rife. He was mayor of Évry south of Paris. He was always on the reformist side of the party, bolshy and outspoken, not afraid of raising hackles by tackling Socialist party taboos – namely attacking the 35-hour week and retirement at 60.

Valls claims to understand the discrimination that exists in France. After the 2015 terrorist attacks on Charlie Hebdo magazine and a kosher supermarket he made the most damning indictment yet of the country’s bitter social divide, saying there was “territorial, social and ethnic apartheid” in France. Yet he has alienated many on the left with his hardline take on French secularism. Earlier this year, his support for rightwing mayors who banned burkinis or full-body swimsuits from French beaches saw him clash with his own leftwing ministers. He then drew criticism for suggesting that naked breasts were more representative of France than a headscarf. As an MP, he voted to approve Nicolas Sarkozy’s law banning niqabs, or full-face veils, from all public spaces in 2010.

As Hollande’s combative interior minister, Valls was also criticised on the left for saying Roma people could not integrate in France.

But he now needs to reach out to the left of the party if he is to gain support in the Socialist primary.

Polls currently suggest the final run-off of the presidential election will be between the right’s François Fillon and the far-right Front National’s Marine Le Pen.

Le Pen said on Friday that if she was faced with both Fillon, Nicolas Sarkozy’s former prime minister, and Valls, Hollande’s prime minister, she would attack them on their records in office: “We’ll go in by reminding people that prime ministers have the entire responsibility for the policies that were put in place.”