Former Barcelona councilor Manuel Valls to run for Macron’s party in French legislative vote

Former Barcelona local councilor Manuel Valls will run in the French legislative election for president Emmanuel Macron's party, La République en Marche, according to the French daily 'Le Figaro'. 

The vote will be held between June 12 and June 19, and the politician, born in the Catalan capital, is understood to run for a post to represent citizens residing in Monaco, Andorra, Spain and Portugal. 

The news will be confirmed by the end of this week, the paper says. 

Stint as Barcelona local councilor

Manuel Valls ran for Barcelona mayor in the May 2019 election, and while his bid was unsuccessful, his candidacy got 6 seats which were key to preventing pro-independence ERC's Ernest Maragall from the mayorship despite winning the vote. Instead, thanks to Valls' support, mayor Ada Colau was able to be reelected after coming second. 

Valls ran in the Barcelona vote with a platform comprised of independent candidates and also the Ciudadanos party – yet, just a few months after the election, he undid the alliance with the unionist political group soon after Ciudadanos sided with the conservative People’s Party and far-right Vox in several local and regional governments across Spain and voted against Socialist Pedro Sánchez staying in power.

"Ciudadanos calls itself liberal, progressive and pro-European, and many of those in the party are, but it has become the party now reaching agreements with a reactionary, anti-European force," he said at the time. A few months later, the party began its freefall dropping from 57 to 10 MPs in the Spanish congress.

In August 2021, Valls quit the Barcelona local council and began to target French politics again, after his two-and-a-half-year stint as prime minister of the country from 2014 and 2016 under President François Hollande, two years as home affairs minister, and over ten years as MP for the Socialist Party.