Manuel Valls is stuck up a cul-de-sac, and his predicament doesn’t date from when he lost to Benoît Hamon in the January socialist primary elections to choose the presidential candidate of the party and its allies. No, the dead end in which he finds himself is with regard to the ambition he has held for much of his career, namely to take hold of the French Socialist Party, and to transform it from its modern foundation, as enacted at the 1971 Epinay Congress, into a party resembling the New Labour of Tony Blair.
Valls’s declaration that he would support neither the socialist presidential candidate Benoît Hamon nor the maverick centrist Emmanuel Macron is first and foremost the symbol of his quandary, a “nor-nor” that applies to himself: he is neither on the inside as head of the Socialist Party, nor on the outside as the leader of an alternative movement. He is quite simply out of the running.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
Valls was unable to follow the calls of his numerous allies who urged him to support Emmanuel Macron in the period before the first round of voting in the elections -before the contest may become a second-round playoff against the far-right - even though his political position could fully lead him to do so. Since that moment, in 2009, when he declared that “the word ‘socialist’ no longer means anything” , when his project was to win over the centre-left and centre–right, he has now been able to see his dream come true, in the form of Macron’s movement “En Marche”. Whether he likes it or not, Macron, who served as economy minister during Valls’s period as prime minister, is the creature of his making.
Valls’s own camp, of which a number have already rallied behind Macron, are perfectly entitled to call for him to give his clear support to the latter. Their position is not incoherent, although they forget one important thing, which is that Valls doesn’t picture himself as back-up but as a leader, and from that point of view the role is already taken. Macron, who is not a member of the Socialist Party, and who resigned from government last summer at the opportune moment to launch his campaign, has undercut Valls’s project.
Furthermore, by throwing his hat into the socialist primary elections, Valls in effect gagged himself. He was duty-bound to call for party unity, for consideration of all the party’s members, including those who he methodically expelled from government after his appointment as prime minister in 2014, and he committed himself to supporting whoever won the primary. But the winner was Benoît Hamon. If he turned his back on his pledge, Valls would look like conservative presidential candidate François Fillon, who, after allegations that that he fraudulently paid his wife and children as parliamentary assistants, promised to withdraw from the race if ever he was formally placed under investigation in the judicial enquiry into the matter. Which he was, but Fillon in the end decided not to step down.
Ridicule can kill a politician. For the sake of keeping his word, Valls could not join the march of En Marche if he wanted to save his chances of making a bid for the presidency in 2022, if ever Macron loses in this year’s race. But also, in the name of political coherence, he cannot openly back Hamon’s campaign without himself becoming a rebel, as leftist Hamon was when Valls was in office.
By treading a line of distance, jammed between Macron on the Right and Hamon on the Left, Valls has ended up being a leader of nothing and stuck between a rock and a hard place. Wanting to be faithful to his political family, which he has often repeated, and faithful to his own project of getting rid of that same family, he has become tangled, tied, strapped, stitched up by his contradictions.
This pathetic episode symbolizes François Hollande’s five-year term as president. It was he who decided to appoint Valls as prime minister in 2014 after the hammering the socialists suffered in nationwide municipal elections. Hollande previously served for ten years as head of the Socialist Party. His political career began under the late French president François Mitterrand, and flourished under former socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin. During party congresses, Hollande distinguished himself as a unifier, as the man who succeeded in bringing together the opposing movements of a party that for 50 years has been fraught by fighting between its Left and Right, but which, come election time, had managed to remain effective. The result is now before our eyes.
Five years ago, in the run-up to the first round of the 2012 presidential elections, Hollande, the socialist candidate, was credited by opinion polls with between 27% and 30% of voting intentions. This month, Benoît Hamon’s score is half as much, at between 14%-15%. The unifier has become the divider. He is readying himself to hang up his hat while leaving behind him a party that is tragically split with bits behind Hamon, bits behind Macron and other morsels in the neither-one-or-the-other camp of Valls.
With Valls’s help, Hollande has methodically unstitched the modern Socialist Party as founded at the Epinay Congress more than five decades ago, sifting the good seed from the rye grass. The centrist good seed, having lost its anchorage to the Left, has become the same as all the French centrists, drifting towards the Right, but not too much.
With the near political bankruptcy of the party, what either Hollande or Valls have to say is no longer of much importance. In the Socialist Party of 2017, that which they created, Hamon cannot find his base and Macron is not a part of it. The next chapter in the story will unfold at the first round of the elections, on April 23rd, and neither Hollande nor Valls will have a role. Through their efforts to exclude others in the party, they have ended up excluding themselves.
-------------------------
- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse