page_title: 2017 French Socialist Party presidential primary
section_title: Candidacies
hierarchical_section_title: 2017 French Socialist Party presidential primary / Background / Candidacies
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Vue de A. Montebourg lors de sa campagne lanouvelleFrance pour être le candidat de son parti en 2012. Leconseiller général Alexandre Tunc a le micro.
context_page_description: The French Socialist Party held a two-round presidential primary to select a candidate for the 2017 presidential election on 22 and 29 January 2017. It was the second open primary held by the center-left coalition, after the primary in 2011 in which François Hollande defeated Martine Aubry to become the Socialist nominee. Hollande went on to defeat incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy in the 2012 presidential election. However, because of his low approval rating, he announced that he would not seek re-election, becoming the first president of the Fifth Republic to decide not to run for a second term. The primary was contested by seven candidates, four from the Socialist Party and three representing other parties part of the left-wing electoral alliance.
  The three frontrunners in the first round of the primary were Manuel Valls, who served as Hollande's Prime Minister from 2014 to 2016 and interior minister from 2012 to 2014; Benoît Hamon, Minister of National Education in 2014; and Arnaud Montebourg, Minister of the Economy, Production Recovery and the Digital Sector from 2012 to 2014.
context_section_description: Former economy minister Arnaud Montebourg, who also ran for the nomination of the Socialists in 2011, was one of the first to declare interest in a speech at Mont Beuvray on 16 May 2016, widely viewed as indicating his interest in running for the presidency, in which he issued a "call" to "build" a "great alternative project for France" to an audience of 200 Socialist Party militants. Among those in attendance were former minister Aurélie Filippetti, as well as MPs Christian Paul, chief among the party's rebels, having had a part in the foundation of the New Socialist Party caucus along with Montebourg, Laurent Baumel and Patrice Prat. Montebourg officially declared his candidacy on 16 August, decrying Hollande's betrayal of the "ideals of the left" in Frangy-en-Bresse in his home département of Saône-et-Loire, and laid out an anti-globalization campaign platform based on protectionism for French businesses, threats to nationalize predatory banks, and tax breaks for the middle class, themes which became central to his campaign. These themes were reflective of his combative tenure as economy minister, in which he threatened to nationalize divisions of ArcelorMittal and attempted but ultimately failed to prevent General Electric's partial acquisition of French multinational Alstom.
  Former French education minister Benoît Hamon, another founder of the New Socialist Party caucus, declared his candidacy on the same day, arguing that Hollande could "no longer earn the French people's trust" and proposed to raise the minimum wage, to further reduce the 35-hour workweek instituted by the Socialists in 2000 to 32 hours, a €35 billion stimulus for the French economy, and legalizing marijuana. His signature campaign plan, however, was his intention to introduce a €300–400 billion universal basic income program funded by a tax on robots, equivalent to a monthly income of approximately €750 per person. Like Montebourg, he was ejected from the Socialist government by prime minister Manuel Valls in a wider purge of left-wing dissenters after the fall of the First Valls Government in August 2014. On 1 December 2016, incumbent President François Hollande announced in a televised address from the Élysée Palace that he would not seek a second term in office, clearing the way for Valls to enter the race, who subsequently announced his candidacy on 5 December.
  Valls, Montebourg, and Hamon ultimately became the main three contenders for the Socialist nomination, but several other candidates ultimately participated in the primary. Former Minister of National Education Vincent Peillon made a late bid to become the Socialist nominee, announcing his candidacy on 11 December, returning from a two-and-a-half-year residency in Switzerland in which he taught philosophy at the University of Neuchâtel and wrote novels; his bid contrasts with those of Montebourg and Hamon, representing the mainstream Socialist Party as opposed to its left-wing rebels. Three other candidates, not of the Socialist Party, also ran in the primary as members of the parties of la Belle Alliance Populaire, a left-wing grouping. Among these were MP François de Rugy, representing the Ecologist Party which he founded along with Senator Jean-Vincent Placé after leaving the EELV in August 2015 over concerns about the party pandering to its left wing; Sylvia Pinel of the Radical Party of the Left (PRG), and Jean-Luc Bennahmias, who left the Democratic Movement to found his own centre-left party, the Democratic Front.
  Several other candidates also filed petitions to run in the primary, including Senator Marie-Noëlle Lienemann, Gérard Filoche, Fabien Verdier, and Pierre Larrouturou. Despite initially contemplating running, Lienemann decided not to run in the primary on 9 December, worried about the splitting of votes between candidates of the party's left wing – Montebourg and Hamon – and urging them to unite forces. Although she stated that she faced pressure to withdraw her candidacy, these pressures were not a factor in her recusal from the primary. Filoche, a trade unionist, faile
caption: Arnaud Montebourg during his 2011 campaign for the Socialist nomination
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