The New Popular Front (NFP) can say thank you to François Bayrou. Nothing like the appointment of Manuel Valls to close the ranks of PS deputies and bring them back quickly to the coalition of the left, inaugurated last June with a view to the legislative elections. Shamed in their ranks, symbol of the ideological drift to the right, the former Minister of the Interior (May 2012 – March 2014) and Prime Minister (March 2014 – December 2016) of François Hollande had burned the bridges by calling to vote for Emmanuel Macron in the first round of the 2017 presidential election against his winner in the socialist primary, Benoît Hamon.
Since then, Manuel Valls' political navigation has followed some rather confusing courses. Related Macronist MP in Essonne, he broke with France by listening to his Catalan fiber. He ran for mayor of Barcelona with the support of the anti-independence liberal party Ciudadanos. Coming in fourth place, he ended up resigning in 2021 from his seat on the municipal council to return to France, where he spoke for LR Valérie Pécresse during the 2021 regional elections in Île-de-France. Last June, he was sharply eliminated in the first round of the legislative elections in the fifth constituency of French people living abroad.
The Mayotte construction site
By raising him to the rank of Minister of State, Emmanuel Macron and François Bayrou carried out a spectacular repechage. Manuel Valls' portfolio is anything but trivial. Overseas is obviously Mayotte, a department on land which mourns its dead after the devastating passage of Cyclone Chido.
It is also New Caledonia, still volcanic after the riots last spring over the composition of the electoral body, an issue on which he sharply criticized Emmanuel Macron. It is again the movement against the high cost of living in Martinique, which took on an insurrectional aspect this fall.
Nothing simple, therefore, in the mission of this ghost to whom no one will give a gift. He's used to it.
France
