Manuel Valls

Biography

Manuel Valls was born in Barcelona in 1962, the son of the Catalan painter Xavier Valls and a Swiss mother, and grew up in France, later becoming a naturalised French citizen. He joined the Socialist Party at seventeen in 1980 as a supporter of Michel Rocard and studied history at the Panthéon-Sorbonne University.

He worked as a parliamentary aide and in Rocard's and Lionel Jospin's prime ministerial offices, sat on the Île-de-France regional council from 1986 to 2002 and was mayor of Évry from 2001 to 2012. Elected deputy for Essonne in 2002, he ran in the 2011 Socialist primary, finishing fifth, and then backed François Hollande, who made him interior minister in May 2012.

Hollande appointed him prime minister on 31 March 2014. His government faced a series of terrorist attacks and divisions within the left. He resigned in December 2016 to seek the Socialist presidential nomination, but lost the January 2017 primary to Benoît Hamon, and then endorsed Emmanuel Macron, re-entering the National Assembly as an independent.

In 2018 he left French politics to run for mayor of Barcelona with the backing of Citizens. He served on the city council from 2019 to 2021, during which he helped keep a separatist out of the mayoralty, before returning to France. He failed to win a parliamentary seat in 2022, and from December 2024 to October 2025 he was minister of state for the overseas territories in François Bayrou's government.