In choosing Benoit Hamon over former prime minister Manuel Valls, French left-wing presidential primary voters resoundingly rejected the Socialist Party’s rightward drift in favor of its social-democratic roots. Unfortunately, it’s not yet clear if the rest of the country cares.

Hamon and Valls were polar opposites among the primary’s original seven candidates. The former prime minister incarnates the Socialist Party’s national-security-inflected spin on the Third Way: loyalty to business over labor; a fixation on defense; and a prolonged state of emergency, much of it peppered with dog-whistling to racists and Islamophobes.

Hamon, on the other hand, resigned his ministerial post in 2014 over disagreements with the party’s turn toward neoliberal economic policies, preferring to spend the last few years as an outside critic and to frame his long-shot primary bid with an ambitious universal basic income proposal.