Manuel Valls: presidential salvage mission

Manuel Valls: presidential salvage mission

By Hugh Carnegy

France’s new prime minister offers a mix of Blairite reform and Sarkozy-style grit, writes Hugh Carnegy

Financial Times / http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/71db75aa-ba61-11e3-8b15-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2yAtjz9zY

It is a measure of French President François Hollande’s predicament that he has appointed as his saviour a man once branded as “wanted” for crimes against socialism by Libération, organ of France’s leftist intelligentsia.

Supporters of the floundering Socialist government are still getting used to the fact that Manuel Valls, the Blairite bête noire of the left, has been promoted from interior minister to prime minister, charged with pulling Mr Hollande’s presidency back from the brink of disaster.

Mr Valls, 51, is an outsider. He was born in Barcelona to a Spanish father and Swiss-Italian mother. He speaks Spanish, Catalan and Italian, is a big fan of Barcelona football club (his uncle composed the club anthem) and became a French citizen only in 1982 after his family moved there when he was a child.

But it is his role as the iconoclast of the tradition-bound Socialists that has set him at odds with many of his party colleagues and makes his appointment this week so intriguing.

It has posed the question: does this mean that Mr Hollande, always reluctant to assume publicly his colours as a social democrat, has finally committed to a reform path that Brussels, Berlin, business and any number of bankers have with increasing exasperation been urging him to take since he came to power almost two years ago?

There is no doubt what is at stake. Unless Mr Valls, a career politician who has crafted a tough-guy image, can help engineer a turnround in the creaking economy, Mr Hollande’s listing presidency is likely to sink under the weight of unemployment and deep public hostility.

That would not be good news for Europe, which badly needs the continent’s second-largest economy to crank back into gear. There is another ominous shadow in the form of Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Front (FN), which made significant advances in last month’s local elections that proved a disaster for the Socialists and prompted the promotion of the new premier.

Mr Valls, a father of four with first wife Nathalie Soulié, made his political name as MP and mayor in a gritty Paris suburb by attacking the Socialist establishment. Frustrated by the party’s refusal to use its long spell in opposition to reform, as Tony Blair reinvented Britain’s New Labour, he launched a provocative campaign against its totems in 2009. He attacked the 35-hour working week, criticised the party’s commitment to retirement at 60 and proposed changing its name, saying the word “socialism” was a relic of the 19th century.

“I was accused – the worst of insults – of being a social democrat,” Mr Valls said cheerfully in an interview with the Financial Times last year. “Even worse, of being of the ‘American left’. Me, I like the left of Clinton and Obama.”

His assault earned a threat of expulsion – and the front page of Libération, which he keeps as a trophy. In the Socialist presidential primary in 2011 he came fifth. But there was purpose. As journalists David Revault d’Allonnes and Laurent Borredon explain in a new book, his stance helped establish him in the public eye. “It was also a choice of political marketing,” they write in Valls à l’interieur.

Mr Valls’s prominence in the media allowed him to become communications chief of Mr Hollande’s presidential campaign against Nicolas Sarkozy in 2012, earning him the plum role of interior minister. His popularity soared as he adopted an uncompromising stance on illegal immigration and crime, as Mr Sarkozy had done in the same ministry a decade earlier. With his dashing good looks (his second wife, violinist Anne Gravoin, said last year that “lots of women want to sleep with him”), he assumed a position in the opinion polls that Mr Hollande could only dream of and which the president now seeks to exploit.

Yet his record as minister upset both left and right. Suspicious of his Sarkozy-style pitch to FN voters, the left was furious over his backing last October of the deportation of Leonarda Dibrani, a Roma schoolgirl, and her family after police removed her from a school bus. The right points out that petty crime and violence have gone on rising during his time as premier flic (top cop).

That counts for little as he takes over as prime minister. On Wednesday night Mr Valls, who has little economic policy experience, let his reformist beliefs show in his first television interview. “We have to liberate business,” he said, adding that taxes and spending were too high.

But he was not about to go as far as he advocated in 2009. “I haven’t changed my personality. But François Hollande was elected president, he sets the goal and I am the one here to put it into action,” he said. He is well aware that even to achieve the programme of tax and spending cuts that Mr Hollande outlined in January requires keeping the party’s restless left on board, in the first instance ensuring no awkward rebellions in a confidence vote due next week.

“Valls understands the balance of forces in the party, that’s for sure,” says Emmanuel Maurel, a leader of the Socialist leftwing aile gauche faction. “The confidence vote is not a given. He has to listen to his majority.” Before taking the job, Mr Valls struck deals with Arnaud Montebourg, the government’s most outspoken leftist, and Benoît Hamon, another aile gauche leader, to assure them of senior cabinet posts. Mr Montebourg, interventionist scourge of austerity, is now minister of the economy.

A renewed fight with Brussels and Berlin is looming as the government seeks more time to meet its delayed budget deficit targets to make room for measures to boost growth.

Those – especially outside France – who see Mr Valls’s appointment as a signal of more dramatic change may be disappointed to see him now tack to the left. But a dose of pragmatism on his part is probably essential to keep even Mr Hollande’s relatively modest reform package on the rails – and his own ambition to one day take the top job.