French PM Valls to join Socialist presidential race

French Prime Minister Manuel Valls is expected to announce a bid to be Socialist candidate in next year's presidential campaign on Monday evening, meaning he is also expected to resign from the premiership. So what chance does he stand of being France's next president and who is likely to replace him as head of government?

French Prime Minister Manuel Valls last week Reuters/Vincent Kessler

Valls lunched with President François Hollande on Monday, as he has done every Monday since becoming prime minister, but just a week after a meal that led him to promise not to stand in the Socialist Party-organised presidential primaries if Hollande himself stood.

Since then Hollande, whose standing in the polls is at a record low for a sitting president, has announced that he will not be standing, leaving the way clear for his prime minister, even if that was probably not his primary motivation.

To nobody's surprise Valls has let it be known that he will stand in the primary, going to his home base, Evry, near Paris, to make the official announcement on Monday evening.

Who is Manuel Valls?

Valls is a career politician who is firmly on the right of the Socialist Party.

Born in Barcelona in 1962 to a Spanish father and a Swiss mother, he took French nationality at the age of 20, starting a career in politics at the age of 23.

Having been a parliamentary assistant to two prime ministers, Michel Rocard and Lionel Jospin, he became mayor of Evry in 2001 and was elected an MP the next year.

In the Socialists' last primaries, in 2011, he scored just 5.6 percent but that did not seem to harm his career.

He went on to become interior minister in Hollande's government in 2012, then prime minister in 2014.

His appointment as PM sparked a break with the Green party EELV, with its two ministers, Cécile Duflot and Pascal Canfin, refusing to serve under Valls, notably because of statements they judged discriminatory against Roma.

Soon afterwards three ministers on the Socialist left, Arnaud Montebourg, Benoît Hamon and Aurélie Filipetti, resigned over the government's pro-business economic policies.

What are his politics?

Valls sees himself as a moderniser of the French left.

In 2007 he proposed that the Socialist Party should change its name, suggesting that the current one is out of date.

As interior minister he was compared to a predecessor in the post, Nicolas Sarkozy, a comparison he did not welcome, although he cultivated a tough-on-crime image that boosted him in the polls, although not necessarily with left-wing voters.

As prime minister he brought Emmanuel Macron to the economy ministry and Najat Vallaud-Belkacem to education, the first woman to hold the job.

A declaration that "I love business" brought him a standing ovation at a meeting of the bosses' union Medef, although that has not stopped the organisation criticising the government since, despite its use of enabling legislation to push through two pro-business laws - Macron's "growth bill" and Labour Minister Myriam El Khomri's labour reform - without a vote in parliament.

After 2015's Charlie Hebdo attacks Valls spearheaded "exceptional measures" to track down would-be jihadis and after the November Paris attacks the government declared a state of emergency, which has been extended five times but will expire 15 days after his resignation, although it can revived by parliament.

In the aftermath of the terror attacks, Justice Minister Christiane Taubira, who steered the government's same-sex marriage bill through parliament, resigned over a proposal to deprive convicted terrorists of French nationality, although the measure never went into the statute book.

In August it was Macron's turn to go - not because of political differences but because of his own presidential ambitions.

What chance does Valls have of being elected president?

Valls was anxious to see Hollande renounce his intention to stand again but his own poll showing is little better than the president's.

Anyway, before standing in next year's election he must clear the primaries hurdle, which involves winning two rounds of voting in January.

That will be no easy task.

Seven people have already declared their candidacy, four of them on the Socialist left and three former Greens.

One of them, Montebourg, was in third place in 2011 with 17 percent.

He has dismissed Valls as unlikely to unite the left since he is the father of the theory of two "irreconcilable" lefts.

A number of other ministers and ex-ministers, including Taubira, could yet throw their hats into the ring.

But the Socialists will then face opposition from their left, with a Green candidate, who has not yet been picked, and the hard left's Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

Opinion polls at present show neither the centre-left nor the hard left making it to the second round of the presidential election, leaving left-wing voters the embarrassing choice between the mainstream right's François Fillon and the far right's Marine Le Pen ... or, of course, abstention.

Who will replace Valls as prime minister?

The Socialists' habitual disarray has led to lively speculation on who Hollande will pick to replace Valls if he goes.

It is not the world's most appetising job - a place-holder in an unpopular government for a few months.

Names that have been floated in the press include Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve, Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian, Agriculture Minister Stéphane Le Foll, Health Minister Marisol Touraine and Education Minister Najat Vallaud-Belkacem.

Cynics, Le Monde newspaper for example, expect spite to play a part in the head of state's choice, making Le Drian, who Valls would reportedly like to take the job, less likely and Cazeneuve, who has projected the sort of tough-talker image the Socialist leaders seem to like at interior, a strong possibility.