Can Valls Deliver?

In 2012, the motto for Hollande’s successful presidential campaign had been “Time for change!” (Le changement, c’est maintenant”). Ironically, he must now undergo a complete change of course in order to survive until the 2017 election.

It was certainly the right move to pick Manuel Valls, hitherto the Interior minister, as the new premier. Jean-Marc Ayrault, the outgoing prime minister, was said to be “a poor, bland, copy and paste of Hollande.”

Valls, in terms of image and profile, is everything Hollande is not. He has a square, skinny, Napoleonic, face with piercing eyes, which is the opposite of Hollande’s roundish and bespectacled face. While Hollande was born in Northern France in a conservative upper middle class family, Valls is the son of a Spanish painter who settled in France in the late 1940s, and he was not naturalized until the age of 20. Hollande, a graduate of the elite ENA (National School for Administration), is a high-ranking member of France’s statist elite. Valls just attended college, and then served for years as a socialist party underling and petty official.

Hollande has always had rather “complicated” relationships with women, as they say on Facebook (last January, he dropped almost overnight Valerie Trierweiller, his semi-official companion for seven years, presumably for Julie Gayet, a much younger mistress). Valls looks more like a classic male: half Iberian macho, half Latin lover. Hollande has always been eager to promote compromise and consensus among socialists and leftwing allies, while Valls sticks proudly to his own views. Last but not least, Valls has been very popular as Interior minister over the past two years — not just the most popular socialist minister, but the most popular French political leader as well, whereas Hollande’s popularity has steadily declined from his first day in office.

Beyond the many outward differences, the two men may share some essential ideas, and thus may work rather well together, at least for a while. They are both “social-democrats.” In the French socialist parlance, this means that they they belong to the party’s right wing. Valls has always been outspoken in this respect; Hollande, who time and again masqueraded as a more midstream socialist, straightened his line a few months ago. Both men are “Westernists”: they believe in France’s world role, but also in NATO and the American alliance (with some réservations — especially since the Syrian imbroglio last summer — about the Obama administration).

Both have expressed strong sympathy for the Jewish community in France and for Israel — almost an oddity by current French political class standards. Another bond between Hollande and Valls is that the latter acted decisively over the past two years, against several mass demonstrations that might have toppled most other governments. There were nationwide protests against the legalization of same sex mariage and a state of near-insurgency in Britanny against an “ecologic tax” on truckers. (These are serious matters in France. Even a national icon like Charles de Gaulle was almost ousted by street unrest during the so-called “Students May Revolution” in 1968).

But if Valls convincingly embodies a new course, one may be more skeptical about the cabinet, which was set up a few days later.

The good news is that EELV — the French Green party, which is part of Hollande’s broader Left coalition and which held several portfolios in the Ayrault cabinet — declined to work with Valls, and that the Left Front — a shaky alliance of neocommunists and ex-socialist radicals — stayed outside, too.

The bad news is that the socialist party itself, the coalitions largest element and now the cabinet’s only component (along with PRG, a minuscule left-of-center party), is hardly prepared for the kind of drastic rethinking and overhaul undertaken by Tony Blair’s New Labour in Britain in the late 1990s, or Gerhard Schröder’s SPD in Germany in the early 2000s. Some eighty socialist members of the National Assembly even went so far as to openly express their dislike of “rightwinger Valls” as premier.

Accordingly, the best Valls could do was to keep those members of the Ayrault cabinet that were not likely to spell trouble, and to bring in new members with whom he had some personal ties, even if they were far more leftwing than him. Not an easy thing either, especially when one takes into account Byzantine requirements like gender parity, on which Hollande still insisted: as many women as men for ministers.

In fact, most members of Valls cabinet — fourteen out of sixteen — are former members of Ayrault’s cabinet. Some of them are close enough to the new Hollande/Valls line. This is the case of Laurent Fabius, the Foreign minister; Jean-Yves Le Drian, the Defense minister; Bernard Cazeneuve, promoted from the Budget to the Interior; and Michel Sapin, the former Labor minister who is now in charge of Finance and Budget. Some others, like Aurélie Filipetti, the Culture minister, or Benoit Hamon, the new Education minister, are much more to the left — but they are personally loyal to the president or have developed ties with Valls… Read more.