CityLab: Why France’s Former Prime Minister Wants to Be a Mayor in Spain

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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The Guardian: How the murders of two elderly Jewish women shook France

But one reason the case became so notorious is that it fit into what has become a common narrative. France is the only country in Europe where Jews are periodically murdered for being Jewish. No fewer than 12 Jews have been killed in France in six separate incidents since 2003: Sébastien Selam, Ilan Halimi, Jonathan Sandler, Gabriel Sandler, Aryeh Sandler, Myriam Monsonégo, Yohan Cohen, Philippe Braham, François-Michel Saada, Yoav Hattab, Lucie Attal and Mireille Knoll. [...]

For Rachid Benzine, a scholar of Islam and a well-known French public commentator, these killings are best understood in the context of what he calls postcolonial antisemitism. “For me, this is a holdover from the colonisation of Algeria, linked to the treatment of Algerian Jews compared with Muslim natives,” he said. In 1870, for instance, the so-called Crémieux decree secured full French citizenship for all Jewish subjects residing in Algeria, whereas Arab Muslims remained under the infamous code de l’indigénat, which stipulated an inferior legal status, essentially until 1962. The legal disparity continued even after Algeria won independence, when hundreds of thousands of former colonial subjects from North Africa continued to arrive in metropolitan France. Jews like the Attal family, originally from the Algerian city of Constantine, arrived in France as citizens. Muslims, however, had to apply to the government for the privilege of citizenship.

Benzine also noted “the unfortunate reality that the Palestinian tragedy fuels the perception among many Muslims that we somehow have the Jews of France to blame”. Another factor, he said, is the so-called concurrence des mémoires. “We have this competition of who’s suffering most,” Benzine said. Many French citizens of west African origin, for instance, argue that while the French state has invested fully in preserving the memory of the Holocaust, it has made little effort to preserve the memory of slavery. “The disparity is a fact, and it’s true that many black people say, ‘look what they do for Jewish people, and there’s nothing for us,’” Louis-Georges Tin, an activist and the former director of the Representative Council of France’s Black Associations (CRAN), told me recently. Paris is home to one of the world’s premier Holocaust museums and research centres, and a black plaque adorns the façade of nearly every building in the city from which a Jewish child was deported during the second world war. All that commemorates slavery in Paris, the capital of a former slave-trading nation, are two small nondescript statues. The only museum that documents this history is in the overseas department of Guadeloupe, nearly 7,000km from mainland France. [...]

Even the phrase “the new antisemitism” is contested. If the old antisemitism was associated with France’s Catholic far right, which has hardly disappeared, the “new antisemitism” is today used almost exclusively to describe Muslim hatred of Jews. In that sense, many on the left believe that “naming the problem” actually makes it worse, enshrining difference in a society that officially recognises none, and repeating the kind of racial stereotypes that only exacerbate social divisions. But others, both on the right and in the Jewish community, ask whether Attal and the other French Jews who have been killed since 2003 are collateral damage in an egalitarian social project that was always doomed to fail. They often decry what they call “ostrich politics”, what they see as the wilful blindness of the left with regard to Islam.

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Politico: A Frenchman joins the Battle of Barcelona

Speaking in slightly accented Spanish and Catalan — and some French — Valls spoke about his origins in Barcelona (his father was a Catalan painter exiled under the dictatorship of Francisco Franco) and his love for Catalan culture and language, which he said was spoken at home after the family moved to France. [...]

Valls is targeting both Catalan unionist voters — the liberal, pro-unity Ciudadanos, which offered him the chance to be the head of its local list, has thrown its weight behind his independent candidacy — and moderate, affluent nationalists tired of what he described as the “grave problems” of the city; namely, insecurity, drugs and illegal street vendors. [...]

Valls became involved in Spanish politics after his failed bid for the leadership of the French Socialist Party and at the peak of the Catalan independence push last year. His tough words against separatism — “unmaking Spain is unmaking Europe,” he said — played well with pro-unity audiences in Catalonia and the rest of Spain. [...]

Much is still unknown about Barcelona’s mayoral ballot, with not all candidates having declared. Some secessionists are calling for a common pro-independence ticket and others are resisting the pressure. Even if Valls ends up as the most popular candidate, a potential alliance of pro-independence parties or one of Colau and other leftist groups could deprive him of power.

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The Guardian: Persecution of the Roma brings shame on Europe

The Roma are Europe’s most unwanted people. Some 10 to 12 million Roma live across the continent. They have been here for more than a millennium – and have been ostracised and suppressed throughout that time. One in four Roma is thought to have perished in the Holocaust. [...]

In most European countries, Roma are the most despised social group. France is often criticised for its antipathy towards Islam. But whereas less than a third of the French population dislike Muslims, almost two-thirds have an unfavourable view of the Roma. So do four in five Italians, two-thirds of Greeks and Hungarians and almost half of Spaniards and Britons.

The Roma may be Europe’s largest minority group, but they are socially isolated and have no powerful figures to lobby on their behalf. That makes them easy scapegoats. It also makes it easy to ignore the hostility towards them. The silence is as shameful as the bigotry.

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Jacobin Magazine: Emmanuel Macron Goes to Church

This past April, however, Macron made the controversial move of accepting an invitation to speak at the annual conference of the bishops of France. In a country with a long tradition of militant anticlerical struggle, the fact that the president would even get in a room with the Catholic Church’s top clergymen was enough to rouse some secularists’ worries that Macron’s commitment to laïcité was less than solid. Minutes into his speech, the young president seemed to confirm these worries, announcing to the bishops that “the link between the church and the state has become strained, and it is up to us to repair it.” [...]

Addressing the bishops only days after workers went on strike to contest his government’s liberalization of the national rail service, Macron took the opportunity to describe what he believed was the real challenge facing French society. “It is not only an economic crisis,” he insisted, “it is a relativism, even a nihilism, the idea that nothing is worth it: not worth learning, not worth working, and especially not worth lending a hand in service.” In our “postmodern era,” Macron continued, “our system traps people in a spirit of ‘What’s the point?’” by discouraging hard work and entrepreneurial initiative.

The message was clear to anyone familiar with Macron’s tendency to moralize economic activity. Throughout his short political career, he has cast himself as a champion of entrepreneurs and risk-takers against the “lazy.” For Macron, France is divided between those who want to set the country in motion — or as he named his campaign movement, En Marche! — and those who want to keep it stuck in place. In his speech to the bishops, Macron unsurprisingly insinuated that striking workers across the country are on the side of immobilism and laziness; choosing his words carefully, he referred to this moral crisis as “burdening our country,” the verb grever, “to burden,” being a homonym for the word for “strike.” More original was his suggestion that the church is on the side of dynamism and initiative. Throughout his speech, he praised the Catholic “energy” that he believed was the authentic source of French politics and culture, and called on Catholics to continue to “act politically” in this struggle. [...]

Sensing the growing respectability and popularity of anti-immigrant rhetoric, many prominent figures of France’s mainstream right has been determined not to let the Front National reap all the benefit. As a result, its strategy in recent years has increasingly been to exacerbate the far right’s obfuscations by associating laïcité, paradoxically, with Catholic religious identity. The massive protests against the legalization of gay marriage in 2013 revealed the political engagement of Christian conservatives to be a much greater political force than many had previously acknowledged. Under the leadership of former president Nicolas Sarkozy, the Right began staking its future on concocting a mixture of anti-immigrant rhetoric and ethnicized Catholic identity politics that could compete with that of the Front National.

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Jacobin Magazine: China’s Uyghur Repression

he emergence in Xinjiang of a new network of political reeducation camps has been a poorly kept secret for some time. But research and reporting is giving us hard evidence of the scale of this new policy. Since the middle of 2017, a major construction boom has thrown up a variety of detention centers and prisons whose inmates number in the hundreds of thousands. These camps combine many of the brute horrors of China’s earlier reeducation-through-labor system with the latest high-tech surveillance and monitoring mechanisms. [...]

More than at any point since its incorporation into the People’s Republic of China, Xinjiang today resembles occupied territory, and the party’s policies reveal an all-encompassing view of the Uyghurs as an internal enemy. The Uyghurs’ very presence in the land is an inconvenient reminder of Xinjiang’s alternative identity as the eastern fringe of the Islamic and Turkic-speaking world — one that Beijing would prefer to erase if it could. The party may not have any intention yet to physically remove the Uyghurs, but its efforts to marginalize the Uyghur language and rewrite the region’s history serve similar goals to a policy of ethnic cleansing. [...]

In the wake of 9/11, China refashioned its hard-line campaign against separatism into a wing of the global “war on terror,” and in doing so reached something of an accommodation with Washington. There have been sporadic acts of terrorist violence in Xinjiang and elsewhere in China, some of which, tragically, have cost the lives of ordinary Han Chinese. But Uyghur resistance in Xinjiang is much more disorganized and demilitarized than China would like us to believe. China’s war on terror has claimed as its victims even mildly dissenting party members such as economics professor Ilham Tohti, who was given a lifelong prison sentence four years ago for criticizing the marginalization of Uyghurs in Xinjiang. [...]

There’s no point talking about holding China to international norms when those norms don’t exist. If anything, Islamophobic bigotry has become the norm around the world, and with it a variety of intrusive and punitive de-radicalization programs similar in conception, if not scale, to China’s. Reading Jim Wolfreys’s recent book on France, it’s not hard to see similarities with the measures being implemented in Xinjiang: bans on forms of veiling, citizens encouraged to look out for signs of radicalization as innocuous as someone changing their eating habits. In 2015, Socialist Prime Minister Manuel Valls went so far as to consult on the constitutionality of creating detention centers for more than ten thousand people on a police watch list of suspected extremists.

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Jacobin Magazine: The French Left’s Long March to the Right

Today, the situation is different. In 2012, François Hollande was elected with exactly the same majority as François Mitterrand in 1981 (51.7 percent), and had an absolute majority of socialists in the National Assembly, a socialist majority in the Senate, control of every regional government in France but one (Alsace), a majority of departmental governments, big cities. Never in France’s history has a head of government of the Left held so many of the levers of national power. And what did he do with it? One of his ministers, Arnaud Montebourg, summarized it well: “When they voted for the socialists, the French people didn’t know they were voting for the program of the German right.” [...]

Corbyn and Sanders, but also Jean-Luc Mélenchon, are breaking with these ideas, reviving a social language that foregrounds the inegalitarian and environmentally destructive logic of the market. Their programs vary; sometimes, especially on foreign policy issues, Sanders concedes too much to his political allies, the Democrats, who’ve always been the loyal managers (and even the architects) of America’s imperial policies. But for now, Corbyn, Sanders, and Mélenchon are sticking to a line that rejects both Third Way liberalism and the lefty academic and postcolonial verbiage churned out in elite American institutions. Here I’m thinking of the obsession with “diversity” that, in celebrating all identities, often hardens and essentializes them — as long as the identities in question aren’t class identity defined by one’s relationship to capitalist production. [...]

So the bourgeoisie owning “a little bit of money and an apartment” became the favored constituency of a socialist movement born in the nineteenth century thanks to working-class trade unionism intended to unite the proletariat of all nations. DSK, charitably, doesn’t entirely forget the poor: he suggests “caring about them, helping them, training them to try to bring them into the middle layers.” But he suggests no longer “relying on them, because most of the time they don’t want to participate in political life, since they feel excluded.”

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The Atlantic: The Muslim Feminist Group Scrambling France’s Left-Right Divide

And while one might have expected a feminist leftist organization like France’s Planned Parenthood to oppose a group that includes members accused of being anti-gay marriage and anti-abortion, it actually issued a statement of support for Lallab. When asked about its rationale, Planned Parenthood’s national coordinator Victoria Noseda stressed that the statement was not an endorsement of Lallab or its members, but rather a show of solidarity for a feminist organization. (Lallab later issued a statement declaring itself pro-choice as an organization, notwithstanding the positions of some of its members on the issue.) [...]

Today, the right has defined itself largely with regard to economic and security issues—like labor reform and strong defense. But it has been torn apart from the inside between those who have argued for a strict interpretation of French secularism and those who approach the debate more flexibly. Its mainstream party, the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP), went through an internal crisis in 2015 and was renamed The Republicans, in what was widely seen as a PR move. It’s no longer clear what the right stands for, and it has suffered as a result: During the legislative elections of 2017, the right-wing coalition got its worst score in the history of the Fifth Republic.

The left is also struggling to define what it stands for. Characterized by radical social-justice activism in the 1960s and 70s, the left—except at the fringes—now loosely stands for the ideals of liberalism, that is, emphasizing individual responsibility over government intervention. (With the important caveat that in Europe, in contrast to the United States, a base level of government intervention that might be considered radical in America—including universal health care and strong labor protections—is taken for granted.) But even this modest program doesn’t enjoy the support of all its members. Republican leftists—those who identify with the rigidly secular history of the Fifth Republic—feel at odds with more “radical” leftists, who adhere to a more American approach toward religion and multiculturalism, with its emphasis on freedom of religion. One part of the French left believes that the state should offer protection from religion, and the other, protection of religion. [...]

In fact, the issue of Islam in France is “breaking” the left, according to Benjamin Haddad, a research fellow at the Hudson Institute. This is not just for ideological reasons, but for practical ones as well, he says: Local elected officials have long leveraged identity politics to win elections, but now the strategy is backfiring. Christophe Barbier, a journalist and author of The Final Days of the Left, put it this way: “If the left continues on this path, it will provoke a major ideological confrontation that will precipitate its defeat, because there will always be more people in this country that will react vindictively and aggressively toward immigrants, and especially Muslims, rather than risking a bet on community-building.”

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The New York Review of Books: Macron’s California Revolution

Along with the speech, there has been Macron’s quasi-official investiture of his wife, Brigitte, as a highly visible First Lady. And then there are the market-driven economic policies he has endorsed. All this has seemed—from the French point of view—emblematic of Macron’s fascination with the United States. Or to be more exact, with the California version of the United States, where Silicon Valley libertarianism mixes with a general progressivism on social issues—access to education and health care, openness to immigration and minorities, support for gay marriage, efforts to control climate change, etc. Didn’t he declare, on June 15, visiting VivaTech, a technological fair, that he intends to transform France in “a nation of start-ups” able to “attract foreign talents”?

Among other proposals announced on Monday, Macron said he planned to reduce by one third the number of representatives and senators in parliament, while offering them bigger staffs to make their work more “fluid” and “efficient.” He wants to abolish parliamentary immunity, so that ministers of the government and members of parliament will remain “accountable for their acts” and can be judged just like normal citizens by regular courts during their mandate. He also wants to lift the current state of emergency by fall, following the passage of a new antiterrorist law. Last but not least, he announced that he will indeed come back once a year to address the Parliament. [...]

Continuing deindustrialization has shut millions of older employees out of the job market. And unemployment among the young is beating all records: at the end of April 2017, the number of officially registered jobseekers hit 5,836,000—the same number as in the United States, a country with five times France’s population! For the past forty years, whether governed by the right or the left—or even during short periods of “cohabitation”—neither side has been able to curb unemployment. [...]

By contrast, in his campaign Macron avoided the identity debate entirely, as if it simply had no meaning. At the risk of alienating voters on the right and the “identitaires” on the left, he even went to Algiers, the capital of France’s largest ex-colony, and publicly declared that colonialism had been “a crime against humanity.” On many other occasions he showed how much more open he is than the traditional political establishment to welcoming immigrants—provided they are college graduates. Macron’s instincts proved right: the so-called lepénisation des esprits—the “Le Pen-ization of the French mind,” or support for far-right ideas—seems to have abated.

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The Intercept: France Doesn't Know What to Do With the 17,000 People It Labels Potential Terrorists

After the November 13, 2015 attacks, Macron, then the minister of economy and finance, argued for introspection, saying in a university lecture that a lack of social mobility contributed to the isolation of Muslim communities, who were then prey to violent extremists. “Our society has built the capacity to close the door on our own. People with a beard or a name that could sound Muslim are four times less likely to get a job interview than everyone else. … this is our responsibility,” he declared. Marine Le Pen, on the other hand, has thrived by linking the terrorism threats and insecurity with a supposed violence within Islam and Muslim communities in France. [...]

After the January 2015 attack on Charlie Hebdo, Hollande’s government poured funds into both private and public structures that promoted the relatively new concept of “deradicalization.” A Senate report blasted the inefficiency of the centers, arguing that it has become a “de-radicalization business” that has attracted associations from the social sector currently losing financial resources because of reductions in public subsidies.” After the Bataclan attacks, Hollande’s government took a much harder line through Prime Minister Manuel Valls, whose public statements framing Islam within a “a battle of identity and culture” drew upon the right’s talking points. Valls was one of few Socialist members of parliament to vote for a law banning the burka in 2010. He also supported local mayors who banned the burkini in 2016, saying the burkini was a “symbol of women’s enslavement.” [...]

Under French law, foreign nationals can be placed under house arrest in France if they “present a grave threat to public order.” After six and a half years in prison, four of which in solitary confinement (22 hours a day locked in a cell, according to Daoudi), he was eventually freed and put under house arrest. During this period he got married, had three children, and settled down in the village of Carmaux in the south. His daily routines, punctuated by the regular check-ins at the police station, were relatively calm and unremarkable until the Charlie Hebdo attack on January 7, 2015. [...]

‘We’re all guilty in this story,” said Stéphane Gatignon, the mayor of Sevran, a northern suburb of Paris. Sevran is often cited in jihadist case studies due to the dozens of young people who left there to join ISIS. Some left for idealistic reasons, some for humanitarian reasons, others to fight Assad. The mayor’s discourse is heavily influenced by the vision of the open society dear to George Soros, who funds a number of projects in the Parisian suburbs: “We did not understand what happened in 2005, especially concerning civil rights, a topic nobody wanted to deal with,” referring to the year when riots erupted in the nearby suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois after police chased two young black and Arab boys into a power station, where they were electrocuted.

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Jacobin Magazine: Center-Left in No Man’s Land

But there was also the success of Benoît Hamon. And I think that came about because left voters wanted to feel like they were voting for something rather than simply against things all the time. They accepted a utopian program because there has been so much despair over the last five years. They used the primary to support a “futur désirable” (“desirable future”), which is Hamon’s slogan. His program was quite ecological, much moreso for example than the program of Arnaud Montebourg, which was more classically leftist. [...]

Hamon was more popular with the media and eventually succeeded with a clear, ambitious, and strategic agenda. Campaigning on universal basic income, decriminalizing drug use, and so on won over leftist electors. Additionally, he performed quite well in televised debates, which contributed to a youthful image that was important in allowing him to dispel early notions that he was a career politician. This strange mixture of factors along with his focus on running a “positive campaign” — he did not attack Hollande directly, for example — contributed to his success in the primary. [...]

It has been quite striking. There has been a lot of discussion of the European Union in the campaign — and out of eleven candidates, only two are uncritical: François Fillon and Emmanuel Macron. There have been extreme-right criticisms and some left variants but overall a critical stance has become dominant among a majority of candidates. Specifically, the question is often framed in terms of Plan A and Plan B. Plan A means a reconstitution of the terms of France’s involvement, whereas Plan B would be an exit.

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Quartz: To defeat Marine Le Pen, France’s center-left must put their nation ahead of party politics

As a result, growing numbers of mainstream liberals are frantically plotting to abandon their radical Socialist wing to block the anti-immigrant, Muslim-bashing, and far more electable Le Pen junior from qualifying for the May ballot. (The French presidential election has two rounds, one on April 23 and the decider on May 7, with the two first-place getters in the first ballot qualifying for the final). Ahead of Sunday, senior Socialist party figures are signaling they will, if required, break away from the hard-left tax and spend candidate Benoit Hamon. Hamon is favored to defeat ex-prime minister Manuel Valls for his party’s nomination but seems unlikely to vanquish Le Pen.

Enter Emmanuel Macron. The 39-year-old independent candidate is a dynamic if relative newcomer to French politics whose centrist, modernizing stance could, according to his backers, unite the moderate left faithful and pull votes away from the embattled center-right. Macron resigned in 2016 as outgoing president Francois Hollande’s economy minister after pushing through landmark labor law reforms. He is running on an economically liberal, pro-Europe platform under the banner of his political grouping, “On the Move.” [...]

Macron already has the friendly ear of former Socialist presidential candidate Segolene Royal. Other sympathizers include supporters of Valls. A group of MPs allied with Valls’s push for the nomination have started circulating a communique to release early next week, paving the way for a mass defection to Macron. Even France’s Green party has signaled it may be willing to join forces. Dany ‘The Red” Cohn-Bendit, co-founder of the ecologist party EELV, said he was ready to vote for Macron because he was “the only candidate” who could avoid the impossible dilemma of a Le Pen-Fillon duel. Cohn-Bendit explained (link in French) Macron’s vertiginous rise in the polls as evidence of “a desire for renewal, new faces, new ideas, new personalities.”

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Politico: ‘Penelopegate’ hits François Fillon’s approval ratings

François Fillon’s bid for the French presidency is already suffering from the fallout of a scandal over disputed payments to his wife, according to opinion polls.

According to a poll carried out since the scandal broke, 61 percent of French voters have a “negative” or “very negative” view of the conservative former prime minister, while the proportion of “positive views” of Fillon plummeted to 39 percent from 54 percent before “Penelopegate” became top news.

Fillon, who until recently was the hands-down favorite to win May’s presidential election, is struggling to draw a line under the scandal. On Thursday, he was placed under preliminary investigation on suspicion that he may have abused public funds by paying his wife €500,000 over eight years for a parliament job that she did not actually do. [...]

With the scandal just three days old, Odoxa’s poll is the first sign that Penelopegate is having an impact on the public view of Fillon, so far the favorite for the presidency. It also highlighted widespread frustration with the cozy practice of hiring spouses in parliament, with 76 percent of respondents saying they would like to see the practice banned.

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Politico: French politicians salute Hollande decision to free Jacqueline Sauvage

Her case — that of a woman who shot her husband dead with a hunting rifle after suffering decades of abuse — captivated France as an example of justice trumping morality, and triggered a flurry of initiatives to have her conviction overturned. During her trial Sauvage’s lawyers detailed how her husband, Norbert Marot, had not only beaten his wife, but also raped and assaulted their four children, including three girls.

In a rare display of unity, politicians ranging from center-left presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron to far-right leader Marine Le Pen hailed the pardon, which was granted by a president who has already announced he will not run for re-election next year. [...]

At the time of her conviction, rights groups estimated that 200,000 women per year suffered domestic abuse in France. Only 10 percent of them ever pressed charges against their abuser. And while more than 100 women are killed by their male partners each year in France, on average, about 25 men are killed by their female partners.

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Politico: A kinder, gentler Manuel Valls

Former French Prime Minister Manuel Valls — who developed a reputation for steamrolling rebellious backbenchers — has been reborn as a fan of parliamentary debate.

Ten days after stepping down to run in a primary to choose the Left’s presidential candidate, Valls on Thursday announced his intention to abolish an executive decree known in France as the “49-3,” after the number of the article in the Constitution, if he wins.

It was a jarring about-face for a man who used the 49-3 no fewer than six times during his two-year term as prime minister, notably to pass a controversial reform of labor rules seen as a betrayal of left-wing principles by much of Valls’ Socialist Party. [...]

Indeed, he will have to establish himself as the most serious contender against no fewer than three former ministers: Arnaud Montebourg, a hard-left former industry and economy minister; Benoît Hamon, a former education minister who is equally left-wing; and, since Sunday, Vincent Peillon, a former education minister. [...]

According to a December 7 poll by BVA, both Mélenchon and Macron would beat Valls in the first round, both with 14 percent support versus 13 percent for the former prime minister. Even if Macron dropped out, and another centrist potential candidate, François Bayrou, decided not to run, Valls would get only 21 percent, the poll showed — still not enough to beat either François Fillon, the conservative frontrunner, or far-right chief Marine Le Pen.

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Politico: How Manuel Valls aims to win back the French Left

To make the case, Vallsists have been operating in stealth mode for months. A major pre-campaign step was to lay out Valls’ views on issues normally outside the prime minister’s purview, namely Europe and the state of the world. On the first subject, Valls telegraphed a cautiously skeptical view in two speeches and an op-ed in the Financial Times published after Britain’s Brexit vote. EU nations, the prime minister wrote in October, needed to come “to terms with the fact that there are borders — that Europe starts and stops somewhere.”

On globalization, Valls signaled an equally skeptical tone. Once the Socialist Party’s most unabashedly free-market figure, he has now taken a step toward anti-globalists Montebourg, Mélenchon and even Marine Le Pen, president of the far-right National Front. “Globalization long held the promise of prosperity, more jobs and jobs with higher value-added,” he wrote in business daily Les Echos in November. “But we have to face facts: this promise has not been held.” [...]

A robust campaign, built upon solid promises to left-wing voters, could just clinch the primary for Valls. But what happens after that is another question. If he makes it through to the presidential election’s first round, Valls will be squeezed between the hard-left Mélenchon and the centrist Emmanuel Macron, his former economy minister. Both will compete with him for left-wing votes. Polls show Valls losing out to the competition.

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