Manuel Valls

Manuel Carlos Valls Galfetti (born 13 August 1962) is a French–Spanish politician who served as Minister of the Overseas in the Bayrou government and first Lecornu government from 2024 to 2025. He served as Prime Minister of France from 2014 until 2016 under President François Hollande and was also involved in Spanish politics from 2018 to 2021.

Born in Barcelona to a Spanish father and a Swiss mother, Valls grew up in France. He 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 candidate in the Socialist Party primary for the 2017 French 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 French legislative election, Valls 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 (LREM) in the National Assembly, although he did not formally join the party. In October 2018, he resigned from the National Assembly to run for mayor of Barcelona in the 2019 election. Valls failed to be elected mayor, coming in fourth in the election. He served as a Barcelona city councillor until 2021.

In 2022, Valls attempted to return to the French National Assembly as a member of LREM for the fifth constituency for French citizens abroad but was unsuccessful, coming third in the vote.

In December 2024, he returned to the French Government as Minister in charge of Overseas France.

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.

In 1980, aged 17, Valls joined the French Socialist Party (PS) to support Michel Rocard. Within the PS, he defended the "Second Left" (La Deuxième gauche), rather than the more pragmatic left of François Mitterrand. (The Second left could be compared to the 1960s "New Left" – opposed to party lines and bureaucracy, anti-statist, supportive of anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist movements worldwide, favouring direct action politics.) While studying history at the Pantheon-Sorbonne University, Tolbiac campus, he was a member of the UNEF-ID, a progressive students' union.