Manuel Valls

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Manuel Carlos Valls Galfetti (born 13 August 1962) is a French and Spanish politician who served as Prime Minister of France from 2014 until 2016. 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 member of the Socialist Party, and was a candidate in their primary for the 2017 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 legislative election, he was re-elected by a narrow margin as a Member of Parliament.

He then left the Socialist Party and joined La République En Marche group in the National Assembly though not formally joining the party.

In October 2018, he resigned from the National Assembly to run for mayor in the 2019 Barcelona Municipal election.

He had previously been active in opposing the Catalan independence movement.

He was endorsed by anti-independence party Ciudadanos.

Since June 2019 he has been serving as a member of the Barcelona City Council.

Early life and family

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. 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).

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. 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.

Personal life

In 1987, Valls married Nathalie Soulié, with whom he had 4 children before divorcing. On 1 July 2010, he married Anne Gravoin, a violinist and winner of the Conservatoire de Paris' prestigious Premier Prix for Violin and Chamber Orchestra. He met Susana Gallardo in Menorca, from August 2018 they are dating, and they are going to marry on 14 September 2019.

Owing to his family background, Manuel Valls is fluent in French, Spanish, Catalan and Italian, and is distantly related to the Marquesses del Bosch de Arés.

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Political career

Valls, a 17-year-old boy from Algeria, formed the French Socialist Party (PS) in 1980 to help Michel Rocard. He defended the "Second Left" (La Deuxième gauche), rather than the more pragmatic left of François Mitterrand. (The Second Left may be compared to the 1960s' "New Left" – opposed to party lines and bureaucracy, anti-statist, pro-imperialist and anti-imperialist movements around the world, favoring direct action politics.) He was a member of the UNEF-ID, a progressive students' union, when researching history at Pantheon-Sorbonne University, Tolbiac campus.

Alain Bauer (Bauer is the godfather of Valls' second son) and Stéphane Fouks were among his classmates in 1980.

Valls served as a parliamentary attaché for the member of Ardèche, Robert Chapuis, from 1983 to 1986. He was elected to the regional Council for the Île-de-France in 1986 and served until 1992. He became the leader of the Socialist Party in Argenteuil-Bezons, as well as deputy mayor. He was in charge of the operation of the prime minister's cabinet from 1988 to 1991. He served as an inter-ministerial delegate to Albertville's 1992 Winter Olympics. In 1995, he became the Minister of Communications for the national Socialist Party and in 1997, the prime minister's Cabinet's communications and media relations chief. He was elected vice president of the regional council for Île-de-France in 1998, a position he held until 2002. He was also elected mayor of Évry in 2001, a post he held until 2012. He served as deputy for the First Electoral District in Essonne in 2002 and as president of Évry-Centre-Essonne in 2008, he was named deputy mayor for the tri-city region of Évry-Centre-Essonne.

Valls voted for the head of the Socialist Party in 2008, in favor of her former rival, François Hollande; Hollande eventually took the prize.

Valls declared on June 13, 2009, that he intends to run in the 2012 presidential primary. On June 30, 2009, he formed a political group with the slogan "The Left Needs Optimism" in order to provide legal and financial assistance to the Socialist Primary candidates.

He declared his candidacy in the Socialist primary on June 7th. Valls received only 6% of the vote on the evening of the first primary round, just behind Ségolène Royal. He was therefore banned from receiving any further assistance. He endorsed François Hollande in the second round on the night of his defeat. Valls was first elected Minister of the Interior in the Ayrault Cabinet in May 2012.

President François Hollande appointed Valls to the post of Prime Minister in March 2014, following major losses to center-right and extreme-right political parties in French municipal elections. Jean-Marc Ayrault was recalled by the end of the day after he had resigned earlier that day. On April 2, 2014, the Valls Cabinet was formed, consisting of 15 ministers from the Socialist Party and two ministers from the Radical Party of the Left.

He was chastised for saying that "France will have to live with terrorism" following the Nice truck attack in 2016. As he joined the victims' memorial, French people booed him, yelling "murderer" and "resign" at him before the minute of silence for the dead began.

Valls resigned from office on December 6, 2016 to run in the primaries as the Socialist nominee in the 2016 presidential election. He was recalled by Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve. During the first round of the primary on Jan. 22, he came in second, behind his ex-Minister of National Education Benoît Hamon. Both candidates advanced to the second round, which was held on January 29th. Valls was disqualified in the second round of the second round, losing 41% of the vote to Hamon's 58%. Valls was unexpectedly defeated by the more left-leaning candidate who then became the Socialist Party's nominee. Valls later declared his love for En Marche's Emmanuel Macron, despite promising to support Hamon's candidacy.

Valls refused to support Benoît Hamon after his defeat in the Socialist Party primary, citing the difference in viewpoints. Valls revealed on BFMTV that he was endorsing Emmanuel Macron in March.

Valls declared that after Macron's victory in the second round of the presidential race, he vowed to run for reelection to the National Assembly under En Marche! The Socialist Party was "dead" on a banner, which announced that it was "dead." Valls' disciplinary proceedings have began, perhaps resulting in his dismissal.

En Marche!

Valls' application to run had been turned down by the city, but the company did not oppose him in the run-up to the election. Valls gained reelection as an independent with 53.3 percent of the vote in the second round, but Farida Amrani of La France Insoumise protested his victory.

Valls was reported in April 2018 that it was considering a bid for mayor of Barcelona under the banner of Citizens. Valls announced his candidacy for Mayor of Barcelona in the May 2019 elections on September 25 and declared that he was resigning all political positions in France. On March 28, 2019, Barcelona pel Canvi, which means he established his own political party of municipal significance.

The electoral list for the municipal election (named "Barcelona pel Canvi–Ciutadans") included citizens of Citizens and secured 6 seats (out of 41%) at the polls, as his candidacy was backed by the anti-separatist and liberal Citizens.

Valls, along with two other Barcelona municipal councillors who were not registered in the Citizens—Party of the Citizenry (Celestino Corbacho and Eva Parera), gave Ada Colau an "unconditional" vote for the sole purpose of preventing separatist Ernest Maragall from being Mayor. Cs announced the breakup of their relationship with Valls and the initiation of their own municipal association, which Corbacho later joined. Valls had been skeptic of the Cs' tactics after the far-right's reintegration of Cs, and he later stated that "with Vox you end up dirtying your hands and, in some ways, the soul."

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