His candidacy is a grand gesture—one that represents the ideal of the European Union, of late so beleaguered, as a space where national borders and identities can dissolve into a glorious, larger transnational project. In practice, Valls’s campaign is a living example, even a cautionary tale, of how all politics is local, and of how that European ideal can be a vague and elusive abstraction in the rough-and-tumble of an election. [...]
By then, Valls was one of the most disliked politicians in France. Socialist voters felt betrayed not only by his joining En Marche, but also by the policies he had championed while in power: market-friendly labor reforms that didn’t go over well with the party’s left-wing base, and his stance in what could loosely be called identity debates, such as his efforts to strip French jihadists of their citizenship, a proposal the Socialists ultimately withdrew for lack of support. Valls was essentially seen as a neo-conservative. [...]
At the height of the independence push, when Valls was still an elected official in France, he made impassioned speeches in favor of Spanish unity, saying that “unmaking Spain is unmaking Europe,” and in this moment, the germ of his candidacy first sprouted. Valls has repeatedly said, including to me, that he’s a republican in France, which replaced its monarch in the French Revolution, and a royalist in Spain, where he sees the royal family as defenders of Spanish democracy. Opposition to the Catalan independence movement is a pillar of his mayoral campaign. One of Valls’s opponents in the race is an independista running his campaign from jail, adding an element of romantic martyrdom to the political drama. [...]
Barcelonians don’t seem to resent Valls for being an opportunist or a carpetbagger. The city has a pretty open heart for welcoming newcomers from all over the world, to say nothing of Catalans such as Valls. But it isn’t so keen on the fact that he lived here for only a matter of months before announcing his intention to run in September. That he keeps making gaffes doesn’t help. Valls got some flak after a television interview in which he admitted that he didn’t know how much a metro ticket cost here.
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