The deputy of the Landes Boris Vallaud was elected Thursday president of the socialist group in the Assembly, taking over from Valérie Rabault, not a candidate, learned Agence France-Presse from a parliamentary source. Aged 46 and also spokesperson for the PS, Boris Vallaud won by 26 votes against 4 for his colleague Guillaume Garot. Jérôme Guedj, who killed Minister Amélie de Montchalin in Essonne, had withdrawn his candidacy in the morning.
At the head of this group of around thirty deputies, Boris Vallaud succeeds the elected representative of Tarn-et-Garonne Valérie Rabault, who has shown herself to be unenthusiastic on several occasions with regard to the left alliance Nupes. sealed with Jean-Luc Mélenchon (LFI) in the legislative elections.
La Nupes “gave hope”, while being in “the affirmation of everyone what we are”, Boris Vallaud told the press immediately after his election. Valérie Rabault had decided not to run for the presidency of the group, which she had led since April 2018. By taking the head of the PS deputies, she had become the first woman group president in the Assembly under the Fifth Republic.
Boris Vallaud, enarque from the same promotion as Emmanuel Macron, is a specialist in technical questions of financing Social Security, on which he has regularly intervened at the National Assembly since his arrival in 2017. This senior official worked with Arnaud Montebourg on the general council of Saône-et-Loire, then at Bercy from 2012 to 2014 during the five-year term of François Hollande. He then became Deputy Secretary General of the Élysée, then adviser to the PS Head of State.
It was Henri Emmanuelli who pushed him to run for his Landes stronghold in 2017. Emmanuel Macron is a “populist president”, in the eyes of Boris Vallaud. “I feel like a socialist, on the left, in a serious moment when the Republic is being consumed at both ends: RN and LREM”, he told Agence France-Presse a few months ago.
Sometimes categorized as a “techno”, he is also adept at sound bites and good words. He regularly provided press briefings for the socialist group in the Assembly on Tuesday mornings during the previous legislature. At the Palais-Bourbon, he notably fought against the reform of unemployment insurance, the ratification of the Ceta free trade treaty or measures on immigration, denouncing “the dangerous strabismus” of a president who looks “towards the ‘far right “. Born in Beirut, son of the historian Pierre Vallaud, he is married to the former Socialist Minister of Education Najat Vallaud-Belkacem. He dreamed of being a cook in his youth, before a master’s degree in public law, Sciences Po, where he met his wife, then the ENA.
