France’s socialists began voting on Sunday to decide their candidate for the country’s spring presidential elections, as the battered party seeks to avoid an electoral meltdown that would raise big question marks about its future, reports The Financial Times.
The party’s electoral travails have dominated debate in the socialists’ primary contest, in which Manuel Valls, the former prime minister, is one of the leading contenders.
After almost five years in the Élysée and having registered record levels of unpopularity, President François Hollande took the unprecedented decision not to run for a second term.
At present, the polls indicate the two-round presidential contest will produce a duel between Marine Le Pen, the candidate of the far-right Front National and François Fillon, the nominee of the conservative Les Républicains.
Highlighting the sheer scale of the socialists’ problems, the polls also indicate the party’s candidate would come fifth with less than 10 per cent of the votes in the first round on April 23rd. That would be behind Emmanuel Macron, Mr Hollande’s former economy minister, who is running as an independent, and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the far-left leader.
The outcome of the centre-left primary will also indicate the extent of divisions within the Socialist party, which is still torn over Mr Hollande and Mr Valls’ shift to a more pro-business agenda halfway through the president’s term. The 54-year-old Mr Valls, who is at the right of the party on economic and social values, is expected to win the first round of voting in the primary
His proposals are more in tune with a wider centre-left electorate that has shifted to the right amid record unemployment and a wave of Islamist terror attacks. But Mr Valls has irked core socialist members, who feel betrayed by Mr Hollande and want a return to basic leftwing policies. Such voters are more likely to turn out in the primary, according to pollsters, contributing to an apparent late surge for Benoît Hamon, a 49-year-old former education minister who advocates the 32-hour working week, a tax on robots to fund a universal basic income and the legalisation of marijuana.