In the past few weeks, Socialist leaders like Jean-Yves Le Drian, the defense minister, and Thierry Braillard, the sports minister, have thrown their support behind Hamon’s independent rival Emmanuel Macron, signaling a divide within a party already bruised by the deeply unpopular presidency of François Hollande. This division only widened Wednesday after Valls announced his decision to defect from the Socialists and endorse Macron—a candidate he once dismissed as “populism-lite.” Valls told French broadcaster BFMTV that his decision “isn’t out of love for the candidate” but rather “about being reasonable.”
But for Hamon, the lack of support from his party’s more centrist members may not be such a bad thing. The 49-year-old Brittany native has actively tried to distance himself from the current Socialist government, in which he briefly served as finance and education minister before quitting in August 2014, citing opposition to the government’s more centrist economic policies. In response, Hollande reportedly asked: “What would Benoît Hamon be without the Socialist Party?,” to which he himself answered, “Not much.”
Hamon has long represented the far-left of the center-left party—a role that has earned him comparisons to Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the U.K. Labour party. His more than 100-point platform, which Hamon says aims to “make France’s heart beat,” would reduce the 35-hour working week by three hours, impose a “robot tax” on automatization that replaces workers with machines, and establish a universal basic income of 750 euros ($815) for all citizens—an endeavor opponents say could cost as much as 400 billion euros a year (though Hamon estimates it will cost closer to 300 billion euros). [...]
Though Hamon’s left-leaning platform may successfully distance himself from his deeply unpopular predecessor, it does little to solve another challenge: distinguishing himself from Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the similarly far-left candidate. The 63-year-old former education minister and veteran Socialist politician quit the party after 35 years in 2008 to create the Parti de Gauche, or Left Party. In this current presidential bid, however, Mélenchon has no formal party backing, opting instead to run under the banner of a movement he calls La France insoumise, or “Unsubmissive France.”
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