Manuel Valls, fired up and fighting back

PARIS — French Prime Minister Manuel Valls is finally fighting back against the idea that he’s politically finished — and nobody, not even President François Hollande, is safe from his punches.

It took Valls a while to get to this point. He spent much of the past year watching in mute fury as Emmanuel Macron, his 38-year-old economy minister, claimed an ever wider slice of the media spotlight for himself, often in contradiction to his own government’s line.

Especially vexing for Valls was that Macron, whom he had himself recommended for the finance ministry post, seemed to be taking a page from the playbook the prime minister had composed and refined during years in the opposition. Where Valls once hammered away at Socialist totems like the 35-hour work week, now Macron was doing the same with a tech-y, California-bright twist, and reaping the same glowing coverage in foreign media. Five years apart, both men were compared to former British prime minister Tony Blair — presumably a sort of compliment.

But while Valls long contained his irritation with Macron in public, the younger minister’s decision to launch a political movement that could serve as a springboard for a presidential bid next year changed their rapport irreversibly.

Allies of Valls said the launch of “En Marche” had galvanized the prime minister not only to try to neutralize Macron, but also to isolate himself from the awkward legacy of Hollande and start refurbishing his own, unique brand of Socialist party politics. His bet is that by speaking to French fears about the loss of a national “identity” and the role of hardline Islam in society, he can reclaim his once daring aura — and avoid ending up a has-been former prime minister in 12 months’ time.

It’s a tall order. Then again, back in 2012 few people would have expected that Valls could ever become prime minister.

“Valls has more support in parliament and a deeper understanding of how power is accumulated from the ground up — and not from the top down, as Macron is proposing to do,” said a Valls ally who asked not to be named. “He’s fired up again.”

Containing Macron

In dealing with Macron, the prime minister faces a thorny situation. Overt criticism would betray division in the government and serve the opposition; not reacting would be suicidal. Valls’ middle way is to attack Macron indirectly, stating that government is a team sport and not a stage for individual ambitions.

French Economy Minister Emmanuel Macron | Eric Piermont/AFP via Getty Images

Asked about the state of his relationship with Macron, Valls was quoted by Le Monde this week as saying: “It’s not with me that things are tense any longer … It’s up to the President of the Republic to deal with him.”

Valls allies translate that message as meaning: Hollande must make a decision soon on whether to keep Macron in his government.

“There comes a point, and it’s coming quickly, where Macron’s position in government becomes untenable and he will have to make a choice between staying to defend the common legacy or striking out on his own,” said Socialist MP Christophe Caresche, who’s close to Valls.

If Valls has limited means to criticize Macron in public, he has no such restriction when it comes to government affairs.

Macron was yanked from the role of defending controversial changes to labor law, and the portfolio passed over to labor minister Myriam El Khomri. While Valls said earlier this year that Macron had approved of the switch, it effectively deprived the economy minister of a major reform to claim as his legacy and limits his track record to a single job liberalization law, which Valls rammed through parliament using a special decree when several deputies suggested that none might have been needed.

Ditto, the negotiations between the French government, taxi drivers and Uber, which Macron had tried to make his own last year. Valls abruptly relocated the talks from Macron’s ministry to his own during a spate of violence in January, and has since doubled down against the junior’s minister’s pro-Uber stance by approving legislation that aims to severely curtail the app-based car service’s growth.

Shedding Hollande

While Macron can overshadow Valls, the prime minister’s association with Hollande poses a more fundamental problem.

Valls campaigned during the left-wing primary in 2012 as an icon-smashing reformer who wanted to rename the Socialist party, get rid of the 35-hour work week and crack down hard on the spread of jihadist ideology in French society.

Under Hollande, he’s had to sanction a defense of the 35 hours, pay lip service to Socialist orthodoxy and defend an ultra-cautious approach to reform. Worse, Valls is saddled with the legacy of Hollande’s two years in office when the president failed to acknowledge the severity of France’s economic problems and burdened drowning companies with higher taxes, only to reverse course completely in 2014 with a switch to supply-side policies.

French President François Hollande | Dominique Faget/AFP via Getty Images

From this stretch of muddling, Valls is now attempting to untangle himself. In an interview with the youth-oriented Society magazine published Friday, the prime minister acknowledged for the first time that the government had made many errors of judgment, some of which he said were “not [his].”

The implication was easy to read: If they were not Valls’ mistakes, they must have been those of Hollande himself and his former prime minister, now foreign affairs envoy, Jean-Marc Ayrault.

“We thought — not me — that society was less tense when in fact it was more so,” said Valls in Society, adding that the government had failed to prepare for power, ignored warnings about the state of public finances and failed to stand behind its own policies.

Being so frank about what went wrong is unusual for a sitting prime minister. It reflects a high level of uncertainty about whether Hollande will run or not for re-election, and a sense that the race for the presidency may well turn out to be a free-for-all in which the strongest contenders — Valls, Macron but also potentially the former industry minister Arnaud Montebourg — will attack each other overtly for the nomination in a left-wing primary.

Breaking the Socialist party

Even if Hollande does run, the defeat that polls predict for him presages a major aggiornamento for the Socialist party. Valls himself has repeatedly predicted that his party is due for a “clarification,” which is a polite way of saying breaking up into factions, either before or after the 2017 election.

If the breakup does not happen of its own accord, Valls is working to make it happen by exposing and exacerbating an existing fault-line within the Socialist party — that of identity politics, religion and questions about the role of hardline Islam in French society. Verboten for much of the Left, which considers identity politics toxic and inherently right-wing, Valls has made it his special preserve to the outrage of many Socialists.

Earlier this month in Libération, he predicted that questions of “culture and identity” — and not the state of the job market — would be the predominant concern for voters in the 2017 presidential campaign, a diagnosis with which Hollande’s staff, among other sections of the government, disagrees.

On the question of identity, Valls is charging ahead, regardless of whether he has the support of Hollande.

“Identity questions are particularly important to Valls,” said a presidential aide who asked not to be named. “But in reality there is no difference between questions of identity and economic questions. People don’t distinguish between them and it’s a mistake to try to do so.”

Yet on the question of identity and what he considers the need to address fears about the spread of hardline Islam, Valls is charging ahead, regardless of whether he has the support of Hollande or any other member of his government.

In the same Libération interview, the prime minister said that France should “probably” extend an existing ban on full-face Islamic veils in secondary schools and public buildings to universities, prompting both his education minister and secretary for universities to clarify that no such ban was being studied.

Of course Valls had no intention of making policy by his statement, but rather to demarcate his own brand of Socialism from others on its most unique trait — that it denounces the spread of Salafist Islam, advocates an aggressive form of secularism, and uses blunt words to describe social divides in society.

Many leftists, like Marxist historian Roger Martelli, who wrote a book called “Identity is War,” disagree virulently with the above view. But pollsters suggest that Valls may be onto something.

Bruno Jeanbart of the Opinionway polling institute said that immigration, which he classified as being part of “identity,” had become a source of concern for 42 percent of the French electorate, up from 30 percent in 2012.

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