PARIS — French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said his government had no plan to let foreigners vote in local elections, backpedaling formally on a 2012 campaign pledge by Socialist President François Hollande.
The statement came as Valls’ Socialist party tried to drum up support ahead of local elections in December. Marine Le Pen’s anti-immigration National Front party is expected to capture at least two regional council seats from the Socialists, which it accuses of letting too many migrants into the country.
“That promise, in all senses, will not be implemented,” Valls said during a speech Tuesday at Paris’ prestigious Sciences Po university. “And I am convinced that it will not be proposed again during the presidential election.”
The law, which would have meant changing the Constitution in a special session of parliament, would have put France “under pressure” by focusing attention on immigrants to their disadvantage, Valls added.
As Europe’s migration crisis worsens, it’s become a main focus of the regional election campaign. Candidates from all parties, from the Socialists to Nicolas Sarkozy’s conservative “Les Républicains” have advocated maintaining strong limits on the number of migrants allowed into France.
Their tough stances are supported by opinion polls that show a majority of voters do not want France to follow Germany and allow vast numbers of migrants into the country.
When the European Commission first floated the idea of distributing migrants among member states via a system of mandatory quotas, Valls’ government pushed back strongly. It has since agreed to take in a bit more than 30,000 migrants over the next two years.
However, the government has resisted expanding accommodation for migrants at Calais, where a population of migrants living in makeshift tents has expanded rapidly to more than 5,000 in the past few months. Authorities fear that extending more aid could encourage migration to a region where Le Pen is already strong.
Polls show the National Front leader beating Socialist and center-right rivals in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region, traditionally a Socialist bastion.
‘Still a reformer’
Valls never made a secret of his opposition to Hollande’s campaign measure on voting rights for foreigners. Positioned toward the political center in a party that leans strongly to the left, Valls has pulled his government away from the socially liberal, tax-and-spend approach it espoused before he became prime minister early last year.
But he is frequently at odds with the party’s base and even its leadership. Hours after Valls scrapped the foreign vote pledge, Socialist chief Jean-Christophe Cambadélis announced that his party still supported granting foreigners voting rights, even if the government did not.
“Allowing foreigners in good legal standing … to participate in municipal elections is not going against the Republic, to the contrary it’s one way to strengthen it,” Cambadélis said, according to Agence France-Presse.
Valls also advertises himself as a reformer committed to change until the last minute of Hollande’s presidency. But a student questioned that reputation during his speech, asking Valls the “taboo breaker” if he felt frustrated having to toe a line of incremental change advocated by Hollande.
“I am the head of the government, I obviously move forward via compromises because one can’t govern in an authoritarian, violent way,” Le Monde newspaper quoted him as saying.
His political ideas, which were once seen as too right-wing for the party, had since become dominant among Socialists and in public opinion at large, added Valls, who used to call for changing the name of the Socialist party.
“I don’t think I’ve lost my strength of conviction and my desire to change things,” he said.