At the last municipals, France turned right. And even François Hollande, the eternal undecided, albeit amidst a thousand hesitations, decided to take a right turn in his own way: he replaced as prime minister his lifelong loyalist, Jean-Marc Ayrault, by now discredited, with Manuel Valls, a moderate socialist, disliked by the Socialist Party (PS) apparatus. Valls is not an easy character to classify: independent, decision-making, with a difficult character (immodest and impulsive), allergic to certain clichés of the older French gauche. As news of Matteo Renzi, the "scrapper", arrived from Rome, even in Paris they began to look at Valls as a local scrap scraper. Like his Italian alter ego, constantly at the top in the polls.
Let's start, precisely, from this element. Just a few months after he was appointed interior minister in May 2012, Valls leapt to the top of the most popular French politicians, remaining firmly there ever since, unlike most colleagues and Hollande, who has plummeted rapidly to the bottom. Today the president, accused of not managing this delicate economic phase well, is in dire need of consensus. He needs a character like Valls.
Manuelito, as they call him in the Ps, born in 1962, was born in Barcelona, the son of a Catalan painter, who fled to Paris because he was anti-Franco, and of a Swiss-Italian mother. He only obtained French nationality when he was twenty. He grew up in an environment full of artistic and intellectual stimuli, even if he received an austere, rather rigid upbringing. A XNUMXs student of the history faculty of Paris Tolbiac University, then a hotbed of the far left, Valls was never a rebel, even in those days. He soon joined the Socialist Party, calling himself a reformist and claiming his admiration for German and Nordic social democracy.
From 2001 (and until 2012) Valls was mayor of Évry, in the hot banlieue of Paris. From the outset, unlike his party colleagues, he gave importance to the issue of security, so dear to the average French and an objective problem in these peripheral areas of the capital. In those years Valls also attracted approval from right-wing voters, while he came under the crosshairs of the pure and hard-line PS, defined in a derogatory way as "le Sarkò de gauche", alluding to Nicolas Sarkozy, who was also always attentive to issues of fight against crime. Sarkzoy himself, once he became president, tried to involve him in the government, but Manuelito never gave in. Valls has continued, however, to take positions against the tide, such as when, last year, in relation to the umpteenth problems caused by the illegal Roma camps around Paris, he said flatly that they did not want to integrate, criticizing a certain respectability of left, which led to defending them to the bitter end.
Also on other subjects man is unpredictable. On the economic ones, for example, he has always been a liberal, an admirer of Blair. He has repeatedly criticized the law which limits the weekly working hours to only 35 hours in France and which is judged by many observers as one of the reasons why companies have lost competitiveness compared to other countries of the Old Continent. Even on Europe he can be unpredictable: in 2005 he decided to vote no in the referendum on the European constitution. Obviously, he is not loved in the party, especially by the left of the PS, but Valls, in recent years, has had the intelligence to mediate with various colleagues, such as Arnaud Montebourg and Benoit Hamon, who belong, by birth, to his same generation , but are more to the left and closer to the Ps nomenclature. In short, wrecker, but up to a certain point…
