French Socialist Clash: 'Utopian' Hamon Takes on 'Fighter' Valls
France's Socialists will offer a stark contrast in Wednesday's debate between diehard leftist Benoit Hamon and reformist ex-prime minister Manuel Valls as the two vie for the party's presidential nomination.
Valls and Hamon "have each taken half of the pie: governmental authority for one, activist hope for the other," wrote Laurent Joffrin, editor-in-chief of the leftist daily Liberation.
Hamon, the surprise winner of the first round of the Socialists' primary on Sunday, has wooed voters with his staunchly leftist proposals, notably the idea of a universal basic income, dismissed as a "mirage" by Valls.
He also wants to legalize marijuana and tax robots that replace workers.
The 49-year-old Hamon, round-faced with a schoolboy haircut, has a crowd-pleasing eagerness that contrasts with the square-jawed assertiveness of Valls, 54, who was interior minister before becoming PM.
Valls sees Hamon as "a utopian," wrote Laurent Bodin of the northeastern daily L'Alsace. "To Hamon, Valls is not at all a Socialist but a man of the right."
Hamon joined a rebellion against what he saw as the Socialist government's rightward drift under Valls and President Francois Hollande, quitting as education minister in 2014.
Valls, a lover of boxing and football who describes himself as a "fighter", will need to draw on his pugnacity to reclaim the upper hand ahead of the primary run-off vote on Sunday.
He dismissed Hamon's first-round win as the result of a protest vote by Socialists for whom opinion polls offer scant hope that their eventual nominee will win the presidential race this spring.
"A clear choice is before us -- the choice between certain defeat and possible victory," Valls said Sunday.
"I want nothing of these mirages that evaporate in an instant and that sow disillusionment (and) bitterness," he told an earlier campaign rally.
Valls' parents, a Spanish painter father and Swiss-Italian mother, fled the dictatorship of Francisco Franco in Spain to settle in France, though they traveled back to Barcelona for his birth in August 1962. He gained French citizenship when he was 20.
Valls has four children from his first marriage to a teacher. In 2010 he remarried, to concert violinist Anne Gravoin.
Valls makes no apologies for his pro-business stance and desire to modernize the Socialist party.
But his use of decrees to ram through contested economic reforms as prime minister, as well as a failed proposal to strip dual-national terrorists of their French citizenship, alienated many in the party.
Hamon, who hails from western Brittany, is the son of a dockworker father and secretary mother.
He began his political life as a student activist in the 1980s.
In 1986, aged 18, he joined massive student protests against proposed reforms which then rightwing president Jacques Chirac was forced to withdraw.
The father of two with his partner Gabrielle Guallar, Hamon has a degree in history.
- Broken china -
Valls has warned "the left could die" and has described the emergence of two "irreconcilable" factions -- one pragmatic and open to reforms, the other wedded to the class struggle.
Such statements have comparisons to former British prime minister Tony Blair who dragged his Labor party towards the center and won three successive elections.
Valls is not the only one making dire warnings of a lasting rift within the party that dominated France just five years ago.
"In the china shop, the PS (Socialist Party) elephants have already broken everything in the china shop," said Yann Marec, deputy editor of Midi Libre, a southern regional paper.
"Well before the second round, the Socialist shopwindow is in 1,000 pieces. Hamon the Breton and his promises against Valls the Catalan and his thrusting chin: the spectacle smells of blood."
Source: Agence France Presse
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