Ex-French PM Seeks to Join Macron Revolution

Incoming French president Emmanuel Macron was starting to build his centrist government Tuesday, with his former Socialist boss jockeying for position in a radically changed political landscape.

Macron, 39, was elected France’s youngest-ever president on Sunday, crushing far-right leader Marine Le Pen after a bruising campaign that left France’s traditional parties by the wayside.

He faces a huge task to unite a fractured, anxious country and to win a parliamentary majority in June’s general election, without which he could struggle to implement his ambitious reform agenda. His victory at the head of a year-old pro-EU movement that has presented itself as a home for progressives of all stripes has blown up France’s long-standing left-right political divide.

On Tuesday, former Socialist prime minister Manuel Valls -- a failed candidate for his party’s presidential nomination -- said he wanted to run for parliament on Macron’s ticket.

“The Socialist Party is dead, it is behind us,”Valls, a reformminded prime minister from 2014 to 2016 when Macron was economy minister, told RTL radio.

“I will be candidate for the presidential majority and I wish to join the list (of candidates) of his movement,” Valls said, while insisting that he remained a Socialist and “a man of the left”.

Macron’s newly renamed “Republique en Marche” (the Republic on the Move) movement reacted warily to the announcement.