Manuel Valls | |
---|---|
Councillor in Barcelona | |
In office 15 June 2019 –31 August 2021 | |
Prime Minister of France | |
In office 31 March 2014 –6 December 2016 | |
President | François Hollande |
Preceded by | Jean-Marc Ayrault |
Succeeded by | Bernard Cazeneuve |
Minister of the Interior | |
In office 16 May 2012 –1 April 2014 | |
Prime Minister | Jean-Marc Ayrault |
Preceded by | Claude Guéant |
Succeeded by | Bernard Cazeneuve |
Mayor of Évry | |
In office 18 March 2001 –24 May 2012 | |
Preceded by | Christian Olivier |
Succeeded by | Francis Chouat |
Member of the National Assembly for Essonne's 1st constituency | |
In office 19 June 2002 –3 October 2018 | |
Preceded by | Jacques Guyard |
Succeeded by | Francis Chouat |
Personal details | |
Born | Manuel Carlos Valls Galfetti 13 August 1962 Barcelona,Spain |
Citizenship |
|
Political party | France Socialist Party (1980–2017) Renaissance (2021–present) Spain Valents (2019–2023) |
Spouse(s) | Nathalie Soulié (m. 1987,divorced)Susana Gallardo (m. 2019) |
Children | 4 |
Parent |
|
Relatives | Aurelio Galfetti (uncle) |
Alma mater | Pantheon-Sorbonne University |
Manuel Carlos Valls Galfetti (French: [manɥɛlkaʁlosvalsɡalfɛti] , Catalan: [mənuˈɛlˈkaɾlozˈbaʎzɡalˈfeti] , Spanish: [maˈnwelˈkaɾlosˈβalsɣalˈfeti] ; born 13 August 1962) is a French-Spanish [1] [2] politician who, most recently, served as a Barcelona city councillor from 2019 to 2021. He served as Prime Minister of France from 2014 until 2016 under president François Hollande.
Born in Barcelona to a Spanish father and a Swiss mother, Valls was mayor of Évry from 2001 to 2012 and was first elected to the National Assembly of France for Essonne in 2002. He was regarded as belonging to the Socialist Party's social liberal wing, sharing common orientations with Blairism. He was Minister of the Interior from 2012 to 2014 and Prime Minister from 2014 to 2016. He was a candidate in the Socialist Party primary for the 2017 French presidential election, losing the Socialist nomination in the second round to Benoît Hamon. Following his defeat, he endorsed Emmanuel Macron despite having previously pledged to support the Socialist candidate.
In the 2017 French legislative election, Valls was re-elected by a narrow margin as Member of Parliament. He then left the Socialist Party and joined La République En Marche group (LREM) in the National Assembly, although he did not formally join the party. In October 2018, he resigned from the National Assembly to run for mayor in the 2019 Barcelona City Council election supported by the centrist Ciudadanos party. He came in fourth in the election. Valls is also a past opponent of the Catalan independence movement.
In 2022, Valls attempted to return to the National Assembly as a member of LREM for the fifth constituency for French residents overseas. but was unsuccessful after coming third in the vote. [3]
Valls' paternal grandfather was the editor-in-chief of a Republican newspaper in Spain. During the Spanish Civil War, he sheltered priests who were fleeing from the Red Terror. [4] After Francisco Franco's victory, he was forced out of his job as editor. Valls' father was the Barcelona-born painter Xavier Valls (1923–2006). [5] [6]
In the late 1940s, Xavier Valls moved to Paris and met his future wife, Luisangela Galfetti, a Ticino-born Swiss citizen, the sister of architect Aurelio Galfetti. In 1955, he won the prize for best still life in the third Spanish-American Art Biennial inaugurated by Franco. [7] Valls was born in Barcelona while his parents were there on holiday. He grew up with them at their home in France and became naturalized as French. [8]
This section of a biography of a living person needs additional citations for verification .(September 2016) |
In 1980, aged 17, Valls joined the French Socialist Party (PS) to support Michel Rocard. [9] [10] Within the PS, he defended the "Second Left" (La Deuxième gauche), rather than the more pragmatic left of François Mitterrand. [9] (The Second left could be compared to the 1960s "New Left" – opposed to party lines and bureaucracy, anti-statist, supportive of anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist movements worldwide, favouring direct action politics.) While studying history at the Pantheon-Sorbonne University, Tolbiac campus, he was a member of the UNEF-ID, a progressive students' union. [11]
In 1980, he met two other student supporters of Rocard with whom he became close friends: Alain Bauer (Bauer is the godfather of Valls' second son), and Stéphane Fouks. [12] [13] [14]
From 1983 to 1986, Valls was a parliamentary attaché for the member for Ardèche, Robert Chapuis. In 1986 he was elected to the regional Council for the Île-de-France and served until 1992. In 1988, he became head of the Socialist Party in Argenteuil-Bezons and deputy mayor. From 1988 to 1991 he was responsible for the functioning of the prime minister's cabinet. From 1991 to 1993 he was an inter-ministerial delegate to the 1992 Winter Olympics in Albertville. In 1995, he became the Secretary of Communications for the national Socialist Party and in 1997 communications and media relations chief for the prime minister's Cabinet. In 1998 he was elected vice-president of the regional council for Île-de-France, a post which he held until 2002. While vice-president of the regional Council, he was also elected mayor of Évry in 2001, a post he held until 2012. In 2002, he became the deputy for the First Electoral District in Essonne and in 2008, the president of the tri-city jurisdiction of Évry-Centre-Essonne. [15]
In the 2008 elections to choose the head of the Socialist Party, Valls supported the former presidential candidate Ségolène Royal over her former partner François Hollande; Hollande eventually won. [16]
On 13 June 2009, Valls announced his intention to run in the Socialist presidential primary in 2011 for the 2012 election. On 30 June 2009 he founded a political organisation with the slogan "The Left Needs Optimism," to provide legal and financial support the Socialist Primary candidates. [17]
On 7 June 2011, he confirmed his candidacy for the Socialist primary. On the evening of the first primary round, 9 October 2011, Valls achieved only 6% of the vote, just behind Ségolène Royal. [18] He was therefore eliminated. On the night of his defeat, he endorsed François Hollande for the second round.
Valls was appointed Minister of the Interior in the Ayrault Cabinet in May 2012. [19]
Ahead of the Socialist Party's 2012 convention in Toulouse, Valls publicly endorsed Harlem Désir as candidate to succeed Martine Aubry at the party's leadership. [20]
In March 2014, following major losses to centre-right and extreme-right political parties in French municipal elections, President François Hollande appointed Valls to the post of Prime Minister. He replaced Jean-Marc Ayrault who had resigned earlier that day. [21] [22] The Valls Cabinet was formed on 2 April 2014, consisting of 15 ministers from the Socialist Party and two ministers from the Radical Party of the Left. [23]
After the 2016 Nice truck attack, he was criticised for saying that "France will have to live with terrorism." [24] French citizens booed him when he joined the memorial for the victims, yelling "murderer" and "resign" at him before the minute of silence for the dead began. [25]
Valls left office on 6 December 2016 to run in the 2017 French Socialist Party presidential primary ahead of the 2017 French presidential election. He was replaced by Minister of the Interior Bernard Cazeneuve. [26] He came in second during the first round of the primary on 22 January, behind his ex-Minister of National Education Benoît Hamon. The two candidates advanced to the second round, which was held 29 January. [27] In the second round, Valls was defeated in the second round, in which he received 41% of the vote to Hamon's 58%. The more left-leaning candidate unexpectedly defeated Valls and became the Socialist Party's nominee. [28] [29] Despite subsequently promising to support Hamon's candidature, Valls later declared his support for Emmanuel Macron of En Marche!. [30]
After his loss in the Socialist Party primary, Valls refused to endorse Benoît Hamon, citing the difference in views. [31] In March, Valls announced on BFMTV that he was endorsing Emmanuel Macron. [32]
After Macron's win in the second round of the presidential election, Valls announced that he wanted to run for reelection to the National Assembly under the En Marche! banner, [33] declaring that the Socialist Party was "dead". [34] The Socialist Party has started disciplinary proceedings against Valls, perhaps resulting in his expulsion. [35] En Marche! rejected Valls's application to join but said it would not oppose him in the 2017 French legislative election. [36] Valls won reelection as an independent with 50.3% of the vote in the second round, but the result was challenged by his opponent, Farida Amrani of La France Insoumise. [37]
In April 2018, it was reported that Valls was considering an offer to run as a candidate for mayor of Barcelona under the banner of Citizens. [38] On 25 September 2018, Valls announced his candidacy in the 2019 Barcelona City Council election and declared that he was resigning all political responsibilities in France. [39] He registered his own political party of municipal scope on 28 March 2019, Barcelona pel Canvi (BCN Canvi). [40] [41]
As his candidacy was supported by the anti-separatist and liberal Citizens, the electoral list for the municipal election (named "Barcelona pel Canvi–Ciutadans") included members of Citizens and obtained 6 seats (out of 41) at the ballots. [42]
Valls, along the other 2 municipal councillors elected in the Barcelona pel Canvi–Ciutadans list who were not members of Citizens–Party of the Citizenry (Celestino Corbacho and Eva Parera), gave an "unconditional" vote to Ada Colau in the investiture of the Mayor of Barcelona, with the sole purpose of preventing separatist Ernest Maragall becoming Mayor. Days later, Cs announced the breakup of their alliance with Valls, and their will to form their own municipal group, to which Corbacho also joined later. Valls had been critical of the Cs' strategy mastered by party leader Albert Rivera, after the rapprochement of Cs with the far-right Vox, and he later pointed out that (teaming up) "with Vox you end up dirtying your hands and, in some ways, the soul". [43] [44]
Valls is on the right wing of the Socialist Party, with a similar approach to the German and Dutch social democratic parties. During the 2011 presidential primary, he defined himself as "Blairiste" or "Clintonien", and described his position as "in the tradition of Pierre Mendès France, Lionel Jospin and Michel Rocard". As prime minister, he agreed with being compared to Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi, an adherent to the centrist Third Way ideology. [45] [46]
Valls advocates an "economically realistic" political speech without "demagoguery". He voices his dissent in the party by his vision of individual responsibilities ("The new hope that the Left must carry is individual self-realization: to allow everyone to become that which they are" [47] ) and his positions against a system where some people live only from national solidarity. Describing himself as "reformist rather than revolutionary," he wants to "reconcile the left to the liberal approach". [46]
In his book To Put the Old Socialism to Rest ... And Finally be Left-Wing, he declared support for immigration "quotas".[ citation needed ]
On Sunday 9 June 2009, while visiting a market in Évry, of which he was then mayor, he was caught on camera suggesting that the presence of more white people would give a better image of the city. [48]
In October 2013, his stance in the Dibrani case met with high public approval, with a global approval rate of 74% (57% approval rate from the left, and 89% from the right). [49]
On 14 May 2020, the French government was condemned by the Hirtu Case, [50] a case that dates back to 2013 when Manuel Valls was Minister of the Interior of France. The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) condemned the French government for the forced evacuation in April 2013 of a gypsy camp on the outskirts of Paris that had been set up there in October 2012 following the dismantling of a previous camp. The judgment states that Article 8 (right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence) and Article 13 (right have an effective remedy before a national authority notwithstanding) of the European Convention on Human Rights [51] had been violated. Human Rights, and also ordered the French state to pay compensation of 7,000 euros for each of the plaintiffs for non-pecuniary damage, and 7,900 euros for legal costs.
In an interview with the right-wing magazine Valeurs actuelles in June 2020, he was asked about the death of Adama Traoré (a young Malian French man who died in custody after being apprehended by police), and Manuel Valls stated that "the logic of victimisation is reinforced by the links between the indigenist movement and part of the left" and that "the class struggle disappears in favour of confrontation, of war between 'races'". He also denied that one could speak of "white privilege" in France, contrasting it with the United States, and claiming that the French Republic had already abolished slavery in 1848 even though France did have a past in colonial history. [52]
Valls supported the extension of the years of required pension-contribution to 41, as advocated and achieved by the Sarkozy administration. The extension means that due to the maximum mandatory retirement age of 62, only immigrants receiving the right to legally work around the age of 21 would be allowed to receive the pension to which they would have contributed throughout their careers. "The role of the Left is not to deny democratic changes, nor to hide the size of deficits ... The Left can advocate an à la carte pension system and increasing the pay-in period." [53]
In 2002, as mayor of Évry, he opposed a branch of the national grocery store chain Franprix, located in a predominately Muslim neighbourhood, deciding to sell only halal-certified meat/products and products that do not contain alcohol. [54]
As parliamentarian and interior minister, he took strong stances on secularism, supported crackdowns on the wearing of niqābs in public and defended a nursery which sacked an employee for demanding to wear one at work. He had harsh words for anti-gay marriage protesters. [55] When Catholics protested against "Golgota Picnic", he supported the theatre director in the name of freedom of speech. [56]
When Dieudonné's quenelle gesture became popular in 2013, Valls said he would consider "all legal means" to ban Dieudonné's "public meetings", given that he "addresses in an obvious and insufferable manner the memory of victims of the Holocaust." [57] In July 2014, following violent anti-Israel protests in Paris, Valls denounced what he called a "new form of anti-Semitism". [58]
On 12 October 2009, Valls expressed "total disagreement" with a proposal by Daniel Vaillant for decriminalisation or legalisation of cannabis. The plan involved depriving traffickers of a source of income. Valls argued, "The question of drugs that produce considerable damage in some neighbourhoods and nourish the underground economy, cannot be handled this way. There is a certain number of rules that cannot be removed." [59]
Valls said after the 2015 Paris attacks that French society needed a "general mobilisation" against the appeal of "deadly" doctrines. [60] After the 2016 Nice truck attack, Valls said, "Times have changed, and France is going to have to live with terrorism, and we must face this together and show our collective sang-froid. France is a great country and a great democracy and we will not allow ourselves to be destabilized." [24] The comments on the Nice attack provoked criticism in France. [61]
Governmental functions
Elected offices
In 1987, Valls married Nathalie Soulié, with whom he had 4 children before divorcing. On 1 July 2010, he married [62] Anne Gravoin, a violinist and winner of the Conservatoire de Paris' prestigious Premier Prix for Violin and Chamber Orchestra. [63] [64] He met Susana Gallardo in Menorca; [65] in August 2018 they began dating, [66] and they married on 14 September 2019. [67]
Owing to his family background, Valls is fluent in French, Spanish, Catalan and Italian, [68] and is distantly related to the Marquesses del Bosch de Arés.[ citation needed ]
Évry is a former commune in the southern suburbs of Paris, France, prefecture of the department of Essonne. On 1 January 2019, it was merged into the new commune Évry-Courcouronnes.
Benoît Hamon is a French politician known for his former role within the Socialist Party (PS) and Party of European Socialists (PES) and his political party Génération.s.
Martine Louise Marie Aubry is a French politician. She was the First Secretary of the French Socialist Party from November 2008 to April 2012, and has been the Mayor of Lille (Nord) since March 2001; she is also the first woman to hold this position. Her father, Jacques Delors, served as Minister of Finance under President François Mitterrand and was also President of the European Commission.
Jean-Yves Le Drian is a French politician who served as Minister of Europe and Foreign Affairs in the governments of Prime Ministers Édouard Philippe and Jean Castex (2017–2022) and as Minister of Defence under President François Hollande (2012–2017). A former member of the Socialist Party, he had been an Independent from 2018 before founding Territories of Progress in 2020.
Didier Guillaume is a French politician who served as Minister of Agriculture and Food in the government of Prime Minister Édouard Philippe from 2018 to 2020. A member of the Socialist Party until 2018, he was President of the General Council of Drôme from 2004 to 2015, Senator for Drôme from 2008 to 2018 and president of the Socialist group in the Senate from 2014 to 2018.
Bernard Guy Georges Cazeneuve is a French politician and lawyer who served as Prime Minister of France from 6 December 2016 to 15 May 2017. He represented Manche's 5th constituency in the National Assembly from 1997 to 2002 and again from 2007 to 2012, in addition to the department's 4th constituency briefly in 2012 and 2017. For most of his political career, he was a member of the centre-left Socialist Party, but quit in 2022 after disagreeing with the party's decision to join an electoral coalition agreement that included the leftist La France Insoumise.
Jean-Jacques Urvoas is a French politician. He was minister of Justice from 2016 to 2017. He represented Finistère's 1st constituency in the National Assembly of France from 2007 to 2016, as a member of the Socialist, radical, citizen and miscellaneous left.
Jean-Marie Le Guen is a French physician, public health expert and politician of the Socialist Party (PS) who served as a member of the National Assembly from 1997 until 2014, representing the 13th arrondissement of Paris. From 2014 until 2016, he served as Secretary of State for Relations with Parliament in the government of Prime Minister Manuel Valls.
Michel Sapin is a French politician who served as Minister of Finance from 1992 to 1993 and again from 2014 to 2017. He is a member of the Socialist Party.
Olivier Dussopt is a French politician who served as minister of labour, employment and integration in the government of prime minister Élisabeth Borne from 2022 to 2024. He previously served as minister of public action and accounts in the governments of successive prime ministers Édouard Philippe and Jean Castex from 2019 to 2022. Dussopt was a member of the National Assembly for Ardèche from 2007 to 2017, and again in 2022 and 2024.
Presidential elections were held in France on 23 April and 7 May 2017. As no candidate won a majority in the first round, a runoff was held between the top two candidates, Emmanuel Macron of En Marche! (EM) and Marine Le Pen of the National Front (FN), which Macron won with a difference of more than 30% of the vote. The presidential election was followed by a legislative election to elect members of the National Assembly on 11 and 18 June. Incumbent president François Hollande of the Socialist Party (PS) was eligible to run for a second term, but declared on 1 December 2016 that he would not seek reelection in light of low approval ratings, making him the first incumbent head of state of the Fifth Republic not to seek reelection.
The Socialist Party is a centre-left to left-wing political party in France. It holds social democratic and pro-European views. The PS was for decades the largest party of the "French Left" and used to be one of the two major political parties under the Fifth Republic, along with the Rally for the Republic in the late 20th century, and with the Union for a Popular Movement in the early 2000s. It replaced the earlier French Section of the Workers' International (SFIO) in 1969 and is currently led by First Secretary Olivier Faure. The PS is a member of the Party of European Socialists, Progressive Alliance and Socialist International.
Emmanuel Jean-Michel Frédéric Macron is a centrist French politician who has been serving as the 25th president of France since 2017 and ex officio one of the two co-princes of Andorra. He previously was Minister of Economics, Industry and Digital Affairs under President François Hollande from 2014 to 2016 and Deputy Secretary-General to the President from 2012 to 2014. He has been a member of Renaissance since he founded it in 2016.
The Second Valls government was the thirty-eighth government in the French Fifth Republic.
Myriam El Khomri is a former French politician of the Socialist Party (PS) who served as Minister of Labour in the government of Prime Minister Manuel Valls from 2015 to 2017.
Legislative elections were held in France on 11 and 18 June 2017 to elect the 577 members of the 15th National Assembly of the Fifth Republic. They followed the two-round presidential election won by Emmanuel Macron. The centrist party he founded in 2016, La République En Marche! (LREM), led an alliance with the centrist Democratic Movement (MoDem); together, the two parties won 350 of the 577 seats—a substantial majority—in the National Assembly, including an outright majority of 308 seats for LREM. The Socialist Party (PS) was reduced to 30 seats and the Republicans (LR) reduced to 112 seats, and both parties' allies also suffered from a marked drop in support; these were the lowest-ever scores for the centre-left and centre-right in the legislative elections. The movement founded by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, la France Insoumise (FI), secured 17 seats, enough for a group in the National Assembly. Among other major parties, the French Communist Party (PCF) secured ten and the National Front (FN) obtained eight seats. Both rounds of the legislative election were marked by record low turnout.
The French Socialist Party held a two-round presidential primary to select a candidate for the 2017 presidential election on 22 and 29 January 2017. It was the second open primary held by the center-left coalition, after the primary in 2011 in which François Hollande defeated Martine Aubry to become the Socialist nominee. Hollande went on to defeat incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy in the 2012 presidential election. However, because of his low approval rating, he announced that he would not seek re-election, becoming the first president of the Fifth Republic to decide not to run for a second term. The primary was contested by seven candidates, four from the Socialist Party and three representing other parties part of the left-wing electoral alliance.
La France Insoumise is a left-wing political party in France. It was launched in 2016 by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, then a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) and former co-president of the Left Party (PG). It aims to implement the eco-socialist and democratic socialist programme L'Avenir en commun. The party utilises the lower case Greek letter phi as its logotype.
Olivier Faure is a French politician who has served as the First Secretary of the Socialist Party since 2018 and Member of the National Assembly for Seine-et-Marne's 11th constituency since 2012. He was elected to the post of first secretary in the party's Aubervilliers Congress and re-elected in the 2021 Villeurbanne Congress. Faure was previously the head of the New Left group, the parliamentary group formed around the PS in the National Assembly, from December 2016 to April 2018.
Stéphane Travert is a French politician who has served as member of the National Assembly for Manche's 3rd constituency since 2018 and previously from 2012 to 2017.
{{cite web}}
: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)