Slipping Out of the Corset: Can New Prime Minister Deliver 'Changement'?

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http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/french-prime-minister-manuel-valls-faces-tough-job-in-shadow-of-president-a-963271.html



Prime Minister Manuel Valls' job is to save François Hollande's presidency. The new government has committed to some changes. But will it push through the painful reforms the country needs or will it chart a political collision course with Brussels?

Slipping Out of the Corset: Can New Prime Minister Deliver 'Changement'?
By Mathieu von Rohr in Paris
April 10, 2014 – 05:54 PM

With his deep voice, prominent chin and black hair, Manuel Valls is a man who exudes an aura of authority. As France's new prime minister, it's an authority he will also have to put to the test.

Things had a tendency to go haywire whenever they could in the government of his predecessor, Jean-Marc Ayrault. The ministers often jostled like validation-starved adolescents, trying to steal the show from one another while the unemployment rate continued rising to record levels. Given all that, this is probably a good time for a disciplinarian -- a man who was occasionally France's most beloved politician during his time as the interior minister and who, in his snappy public appearances, has something of a policeman about him -- to be at the government helm.

Valls, 51, is the Socialist Party's last hope. His problem is that many members of his party don't consider the son of a Catalan painter and a Swiss woman, who only became a French citizen at age 20, to be a true Socialist. At best, he's seen as a right-wing Social Democrat, if not Nicolas Sarkozy reincarnated.

It's no surprise: Valls, after all, once stunned his party by stating that it should remove the word "socialist" from its name, because "it doesn't mean anything anymore." When he ran in the 2011 internal party primary, he advocated "unlocking the 35-hour work week" and a lowering of payroll taxes. He didn't even make it to 6 percent. He later became a popular interior minister by focusing on law and order -- targeting the Roma to the approval of the majority of the French public and the dismay of the left-wing establishment.