French Prime Minister Manuel Valls delivers a speech to announce his bid to become the Socialist presidential candidate in the 2017 presidential election, at the town hall of Evry, south of Paris, on Dec. 5, 2016. / AFP PHOTO / LIONEL BONAVENTURE/AFP/Getty Images (Lionel Bonaventure/AFP/Getty Images)

French Prime Minister Manuel Valls stepped down Tuesday to focus on his presidential campaign, bringing as successor a former interior minister who spearheaded the nation’s fight against Islamist militants.

The new prime minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, takes over amid an apparent surge in French right-wing political forces that reflect wider trends across the West — calling for calling for a tougher line on immigration and stronger steps against suspected homegrown terrorist networks.

The Cabinet shake-up followed Valls' announcement Monday that he would run for the presidency — a race that will not include François Hollande, who said last week he would not seek reelection in April.

Hollande is the most unpopular president in modern French history, with approval ratings that have dropped, by one poll, to a minuscule 4 percent.

In his speech on Monday, Valls promised that France, under his leadership, would remain a bulwark of progress amid a global turn to the right.

“I want an independent France, inflexible in its values,” he said, “to face the China of Xi Jinping, the Russia of Vladimir Putin, the America of Donald Trump, the Turkey of [Recep Tayyip] Erdogan.”

Cazeneuve led investigations into some of the highest-profile attacks waged in Europe by Islamist factions, including last year’s Paris rampage that killed 140 people and the this year’s Bastille Day carnage in July in Nice, when a truck plowed in crowds and killed more than 85 people.

In the wake of Britain’s vote last year to leave the European Union, the presidential election victory of Donald Trump and, most recently, Sunday’s constitutional reform referendum in Italy, France’s 2017 election is widely seen as a potential next chapter in a revolt against the West’s established order.

Valls pledged to launch a strong leftist defense against the rising tide of Marine Le Pen, the savvy leader of the National Front, France’s far-right populist party, which has risen steadily in the polls. He said he would step down as prime minister Tuesday to seek the Socialist presidential nomination in a primary in January.

If he wins the primary, Valls will also have to contend with François Fillon, a more moderate conservative candidate who advocates a free-market economic platform but shares many of Le Pen’s anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant sentiments.

[François Fillon vows return of the traditional French right]

The French left, once the undisputed bedrock of national politics and a principal architect of the European Union, has fallen in esteem to such a degree that winning the presidency in 2017 is almost inconceivable, analysts say.

As an explanation, they generally cite France’s stubbornly high unemployment rate and a wave of devastating terrorist attacks that have claimed some 230 lives here in the last two years. In the wake of those attacks, Hollande’s Socialist government has struggled to project an image of strength, responding with measures that critics say are primarily concerned with saving face instead of enacting real change.

In his address Monday evening, Valls rejected this assumption, insisting with dramatic emphasis that the left still has a viable chance to win the presidency.

“I’m told that the left has no chance, but nothing is written,” he said. “That it will never come together, that the extreme right is qualified for office, but nothing is written. That Fillon is already the next president of the republic, but nothing is written.”

He continued: “The left is big and beautiful when it speaks to all the French, when it gathers together, when its destiny is entwined with that of France. France needs the left!”

[Why Hollande won’t seek reelection]

But the French left is deeply divided within its own ranks, largely thanks to Hollande’s controversial proposal to strip French nationality from convicted terrorists who hold dual citizenship. Many on the left insisted that the proposal would enshrine a legal distinction between citizens who are supposed to remain equal before the law, and it was ultimately abandoned. But the broader rift inside the party has remained.

Valls, who has sought to project a certain tough-guy swagger as prime minister, has been a constant fixture in that internal struggle, especially vis-à-vis France’s Muslim community, the country’s largest minority group. During a furor over the “burkini” this past summer, for instance, when some 30 French towns banned the modest swimsuit from public beaches, he was among the towns’ loudest defenders.

French courts have since overturned many of the burkini bans in the jurisdictions that passed them.

But Valls called the burkini, designed to allow Muslim women to enjoy the beach while respecting traditional dress codes, a “provocation,” insisting that the garment was an affront to France’s secular values. In response, Muslim leaders quickly accused him of hypocrisy. Supporters of French secularism, they pointed out, do not object that virtually all of France’s public holidays are Christian in origin.

On Monday, Valls suggested that bigger battles lie ahead.

“I note the division on the left,” he said, “but until when will we endure this spectacle?”

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