French PM Valls Says Will Run in Presidential Election

Manuel Valls, Prime Minister of France, has formally declared that he will stand to be the socialist candidate in the country’s 2017 presidential election.

A snap opinion poll, conducted after Hollande’s statement, showed Socialist voters and French voters as a whole wanted to see Valls win the party ticket to run for president next year.

According to Reuters, the prime minister is anticipated to resign from his post on Tuesday with either Michel Sapin, the finance minister or Bernard Cazeneuve, the interior minister, likely to replace him.

Valls said Friday he was determined to “defend the legacy” of Hollande, despite opinion polls showing that his former boss is the least popular French president for almost 60 years. He did this although he did not hold French citizenship until he was 20 years old, being Catalan by origin and having immigrated to France as a teenager.

Mr. Valls may have trouble emerging from the Socialists’ primary.

While Hollande becomes the first president not to seek re-election, no sitting prime minister has won a presidential election. Valls now has to disentangle himself from Hollande’s deeply unpopular presidency, during which the premier spearheaded reforms to liberalize the labor market and talked tough on law and order – causing deep rifts within party ranks.

Appealing to the left wing of the party and many traditionalists who have disowned him, Mr Valls…

“A boss must know how to be the boss. We must defend this action and I will do that unfailingly”, he said.

Like Sarkozy, Valls is known for his frank, sometimes shocking words – and he cherishes an image of “top cop” inherited from his time as Interior Minister from 2012 to 2014. “The French citizens will never elect Hollande’s lookalike”, he explained.

“Manuel Valls is Francois Hollande’s lookalike”.

A long-time mayor of Evry, a gritty southern suburb of Paris, Valls has four children. He was his prime minister.

He has spoken out about the failure of France to offer opportunities to immigrant families in grim high-rise homes outside major cities, deploring the “spatial, social and ethnic apartheid”.

Valls has always been considered a plain-speaking, ambitious politician who joined the Socialists Party aged 17 years old and has defended its centrist policies.