Benoît Hamon, a former education minister, hammered ex-prime minister Manuel Valls to become the French Socialist Party’s candidate for the upcoming presidential election in April, pushing the already divided party sharply to the left. Opinion polls have shown neither men would garner enough support to reach the election's runoff in May, and were likely to come in a humiliating fifth place in the first round behind centrist Emmanuel Macron and left-winger Jean-Luc Melenchon.
In the second round run-off to select the Socialist Party's candidate in this year's spring presidential election, the leftist candidate, former Minister of National Education Benoît Hamon, topped former Prime Minister Manuel Valls, a centrist, with 58.65 percent of the vote.