Former French PM Manuel Valls says his Socialist party is dead

Manuel Valls, the former Socialist prime minister of France, said he wanted to fight next month’s National Assembly elections under the banner of Emmanuel Macron’s centrist En Marche, as he declared his Socialist party “dead and gone”.

“I will be a candidate in the presidential majority and I wish to join up to his movement,” the pro-business social democrat told RTL radio on Tuesday.

Mr Macron, who beat Marine Le Pen, the far-right candidate, in Sunday’s presidential election, needed a “large and coherent” parliamentary majority “so that he can govern”, Mr Valls said.

“I am attached to the Socialist party, its history, its values but the Socialist party is dead and gone,” he said.

Mr Valls has not yet been accepted as an En Marche candidate and is still a Socialist party member. But his move could mark the beginning of a broad realignment of French politics around a reformist centre. But peeling off moderate members of a Socialist party in meltdown since its disastrous result in the first round of the presidential election is likely to be easier than luring centre-right Republicans. The latter could even be put off by the endorsement of a former heavyweight of the previous Socialist government.

Mr Macron, who fell out with Mr Valls while in government, has said he would be ready to welcome his former boss in his party. But on Tuesday reactions to the Socialist veteran’s intentions received a lukewarm welcome at En Marche.

Benjamin Griveaux, a political adviser to Mr Macron, noted that the former prime minister had not yet submitted his application online, as is the rule for all those seeking to become candidates. “He has 24 hours to do so,” Mr Griveaux said.

Jean-Paul Delevoye, the chairman of the commission in charge of the endorsements, said it had already picked a female candidate for Mr Valls’ constituency in Essonne, southern Paris, although the decision was not yet definitive.

The centrist party is to disclose the names of all its candidates seeking seats in parliament on Thursday.

After winning the presidential election with two-thirds of the vote, Mr Macron needs to build a majority in the legislative elections next month so he can press on with his reforms.

En Marche, his one-year-old political movement, has changed its name to La République en Marche (Republic on the Move) to broaden its appeal. It has as yet no elected MPs.

Mr Macron is trying to attract moderate members from the mainstream parties to help him assemble a solid majority while fulfilling his promise of political renewal. His party professes to be neither on the left nor on right and he has said that at least half the candidates would have to come from civil society with no political affiliation, and half would have to be women. Applicants from any party are welcome but they must drop any political affiliations.

All 577 posts in the legislative elections for the National Assembly are up for grabs and La République en Marche says it will contest every seat. To secure a majority, Mr Macron would need 290 seats.

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In March, Mr Valls became the most senior socialist to endorse Mr Macron, infuriating many colleagues when he said he would vote for Mr Macron in the presidential election rather than Benoît Hamon, the party’s candidate. Mr Valls, who was knocked out of the Socialist primaries for the presidential contest in January, said he was trying to prevent the rise of the far right.

Mr Hamon won only 6.4 per cent of the vote on April 23. That result was a “death certificate”, said Didier Guillaume, leader of the Socialists in the Senate, on Tuesday.

Squeezed between Mr Macron’s social liberal brand of centrism and the hard left espoused by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the party is struggling with deep ideological rifts and animosity among leading figures.

“I hope for France that Brutus and Judas are not going to seek to become candidates for En Marche!”, said Alexis Bachelay, a Socialist MP, in a tweet.

This story was updated to make clear Mr Valls has not yet been accepted by En Marche as one of its candidates