Benoît Hamon wins Socialist Party presidential primary in France
By
Alice Laurençon
30 January 2017
In a landslide victory, Benoît Hamon won yesterday’s second round of the ruling Socialist Party’s (PS) primary contest and became the party’s presidential candidate. According to initial figures yesterday evening, Hamon, the former education minister under President François Hollande, received 59 percent of the vote, eliminating former Prime Minister Manuel Valls, who won only 41 percent.
Two million voters cast their ballots, as opposed to the 4 million voters who participated in the primary contest for the right-wing Republicans (LR) in November, in a campaign marked primarily by vast popular disaffection with the PS government.
Hamon hailed his victory as the day “the left lifted its head once again”, declaring the vote to be “a sign of a living and vibrant left”. He pledged “to start, tomorrow, by uniting the left”, and stated his intention to “propose to [the Green Party presidential candidate] Yannick Jadot and to [former Left Party leader] Jean-Luc Mélenchon, in particular, that we create a social, economic and democratic governmental majority”.
The vote represents nothing of the sort. The result of the primary is a rejection by the electorate of the hated policies of the Hollande administration, represented most clearly in Valls’ candidacy. His defeat is a further humiliation for the government, and the PS is widely anticipated to face a debacle in the presidential contest in April-May of this year. The party is profoundly discredited after years of austerity and war; President Hollande has approval ratings of around 4 percent.
Although posing as a critic of Hollande, Hamon does not in any way represent a shift in the PS’ right-wing…