Why France’s Former Prime Minister Wants to Be a Mayor in Spain
BARCELONA—As Manuel Valls walked through La Sagrada Família, the Antoni Gaudí basilica, French tourists would every so often look with a start and point his way. Trailed by one of his security guards, Valls listened impassively as a guide explained the challenges to the over-the-top building project—sandcastle on the outside, sci-fi columns on the inside—which has been ongoing for more than a century and remains unfinished.
“C’est Manuel Valls,” one tourist said. Oui, it was Manuel Valls, the former prime minister of France. Sí, it is Manuel Valls, a candidate for mayor of Barcelona.
On the face of it, Valls’s latest political adventure is revolutionary. A French career politician who served as prime minister from 2014 to 2016—years marked by terrorist attacks that Valls controversially called acts of “war”—is now running to be mayor of another country’s city, where he was born but hasn’t lived since infancy.
His candidacy is a grand gesture—one that represents the ideal of the European Union, of late so beleaguered, as a space where national borders and identities can dissolve into a glorious, larger transnational project. In practice, Valls’s campaign is a living example, even a cautionary tale, of how all politics is local, and of how that European ideal can be a vague and elusive abstraction in the rough-and-tumble of an election.
That much is immediately clear the minute Valls speaks about his candidacy. Valls is a dual French-Spanish citizen and a fluent speaker of Catalan and Spanish. When I asked him why he wanted to run for mayor of Barcelona in the first place, he began with a long windup. “I’m very attached to nations, to nation states,” he told me, speaking in French as we sat on a sunny morning in his campaign headquarters on Passeig de Gràcia, one of the most elegant avenues in Barcelona.
