France En Crise

[00:00:00] The Why? Curve, with Phil Dobbie and Roger Hearing. France on the edge. The second largest economy in the EU has seen a month of violent riots, with the police apparently unable to control the streets. It is one of the largest public debts of any developed country. Yet it cannot afford to properly fund its schools and other public services. And all the polls suggest a far-right leader will take the presidency next year. So what has gone wrong?

[00:00:27] Why are so many French citizens taking to the streets to bring about change? And what are the prospects for France finding a way out of its problems? The Why? Curve. Well, of course, what is a problem for France is a problem for the EU, isn't it? And so the EU has to be involved in trying to find a solution to this debt issue. The problem is, of course, other EU members aren't very happy about that idea.

[00:00:51] So there is this real danger that if it carries on, what's it actually going to do to the EU? Could we get some sort of systemic crisis in the European Union that stretches beyond France? Yeah, because Germany's economy is up the spout as well. But at the same time, it seems more in France somehow. Well, they've got bigger debt. You've seen riots. So Germany's controlled it. In social terms, you know, you've got Spain, riots in Spain in the last few days. You've seen problems in Germany too. But France is different.

[00:01:22] I mean, France seems to be going down a different route, not just economically, but socially. Yeah. Well, which has often been the way, aren't they? The French are more revolting than anywhere else in Europe. Yeah. Can I just disassociate myself from that plaster mark? No, they revolt more, I should say, than anywhere else in Europe. And that's historic, I think, isn't it? There's something cultural there, I think, which means that they are more prone to take to the streets, perhaps, than the Germans, of course, who wouldn't do it because it's not proper.

[00:01:51] Well, indeed. But also, I mean, you know, you have got a big political change coming about in France, very likely. I mean, we know the problems in Germany again, and Spain's got an election. But in France, you're probably going to get a far-right leader, a far-right leader, taking the presidency next year. And you just think, well, this is amazing, really. Yeah. Well, I guess it's because they can look and say, well, look, you know, America shifted so far to the right. And look at how that worked out for them. What an amazing success that was.

[00:02:19] So I guess they can point to that. It might change. Well, it might change. But, I mean, you've got extremes on both sides. You've got a very large amount of polarisation in France. Mélenchon, far left, and obviously Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marine Le Pen on the far right. So, I mean, it's a really interesting thing. Well, anyway, let's dig into what on earth is going on in one of the most important countries in Europe, and the world, in fact, in France.

[00:02:45] Émile Chabal is Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Edinburgh and joins us now. So, Émile, what is it about France that, I mean, because the situation is not great in many parts of Europe, but the French seem to take to the streets a lot faster than anybody else. Is there something cultural happening here as well as, you know, obviously there are fundamental issues with the economy, but is it a cultural thing as well that's going on? Well, protest is something that people inherit.

[00:03:13] So, whether you want to talk about culture, whether you want to talk about memory or history, it's there. The French protest a lot, but they also watch themselves protesting. That is, this is not just from the outside that people are seeing, oh, the French are out on the streets again, but the French learn from each other. So, it's really striking, for instance, if you look at some of the early pictures and videos from the beginning of the school student movement,

[00:03:40] you will see teachers and parents coming to support the children, the teenagers who are protesting. And that's the kind of thing which I think gives protest a lot of meaning in France. And that's a real difference with some other parts of the world where, of course, people also go and protest. But in the absence of that long historical tradition of protests, so going back to May 68 or the Paris Commune or the French Revolution, the protests are less powerful and I suppose less meaningful as well.

[00:04:10] Yeah, and this is a country that has a big crisis. I mean, they're not just protesting for the hell of it. I mean, this is something that clearly throughout the generations, school children, as you say, but also there was a lot of trade unionists involved. There's clearly a major crisis at the root of this. I mean, just give us a sense of how big a problem all this is for France. Well, the difficulty is always thinking comparatively because many people who visit France and many economists and sociologists who look at the data on France tend to say,

[00:04:39] well, France isn't so bad. You know, the state seems to be working. Public services are pretty good. The trains are more or less on time. The schools are OK. OK. So if you look at it in an international perspective, there are some areas where the French have fallen behind, notably in schooling. So some of the international metrics we have, the PISA metrics, for example, about education, France is falling behind, but not dramatically so. And so what we're really talking about here is a question of perception,

[00:05:10] a sense of decline. And there are some real issues. I mean, the origins of these protests, the current wave protests lie in schools, particularly in Lisi. So that's the final two or three years of schooling, which corresponds roughly to the sixth form in the UK or in England. And many of the complaints were really hard material complaints.

[00:05:39] We don't have enough teachers, teachers not being allocated to us. It's important to remember that in France, everything about education is centralised. So the allocation of teachers happens at a central level, not at the level of a city or municipality. And it was also about buildings, buildings that were too hot in the summer. France was hammered by an exceptional heat wave in May, June, July and into August. Many students sat exams in dreadful conditions.

[00:06:08] And those sorts of hard material questions are at the root of the initial protests. And then, of course, as they spiralled out beyond school students, what you end up seeing was the general sense that the cost of living is too high in France, that public services are inadequate, that public services, in fact, have been taken away in the last 15, 20 years.

[00:06:37] And this is rolled into, and this is perhaps the most important thing, a larger political crisis, a sense of political stasis since the abortive elections in 2024, the parliamentary elections which resulted in a hung parliament, rather than the clarity that Emmanuel Macron had hoped would come out of it. So the political economic crisis, combined, of course, with the larger question of the bond market and France's public debt, which has increased,

[00:07:05] all of these things feed into a sense of malaise, a sense of decline. And that's what ultimately gets people out on the streets. So the debt is a significant issue, isn't it? Because the reason why a lot of public services will struggle is because the cost of servicing the existing debt is such a large part of government spending now. And the issue is why buy French bonds when you can buy German bonds, German bonds, for example. So we're seeing this big spread in the yields

[00:07:33] because everyone's going, well, yeah, if we're going to buy French bonds, we've got to have a pretty good premium. So the yields go up. So the cost of servicing that debt becomes even more. So you have this downward spiral until someone does something about it. And the problem within Europe is the only place they can turn to, really, other than doing cuts themselves in how much they borrow, is to turn to the ECB. And the ECB doesn't obviously want to be seen to be helping too much because it'll upset all the other member states.

[00:08:01] So you've got this whole maladministration of the European community, which is not helping at all with this situation. No, I mean, we've been here before to some extent. I mean, the Greek debt crisis and the sort of unraveling of that particular moment was not that long ago. And it's very much within living memory of most of Europe's political elites. And clearly there's a problem.

[00:08:29] There's a problem with the way debt is calculated. There's a problem with the kind of debt-to-GDP ratio calculations that are used. But there's a larger question here about economic policy. And for many decades, a German model of fiscal restraint dominated in Europe, certainly at a European level.

[00:08:56] And ever since Germany has entered a kind of protracted economic crisis, that German model doesn't look quite as shiny as it used to. So there are some big ideological questions around what you do with debt. And there are these management questions of how you, as an individual economy and individual government, how does the individual government manage that relationship to the bond markets? And Emil, that's the fundamental problem, isn't it? Because if you haven't got enough money,

[00:09:24] if you basically can't afford to pay for more teachers, improve the situation in schools. Also, you can't improve other services, perhaps. Even the police suggestions that some of the defunding of police in some ways in France was part of what was the problem of dealing with the riots. If you don't have that money, you can't borrow more easily. You're stuck, aren't you? You are stuck. I mean, in this case, France is not alone. This happened before to other European countries.

[00:09:54] And it's happening in a more general sense across Western economies at the moment. I mean, I suppose the peculiarity of the French case, the French public services are more developed than elsewhere in Europe. Taxation is quite high in France. But the expectation of public services is also very high. And this goes back actually historically to a decision, a sort of concerted set of decisions made in the 1980s

[00:10:23] under the socialist government to respond to deindustrialization by beefing up social programs to try and keep unemployment low. High unemployment is a long-standing problem in France. It's the 1970s. And so there are some kind of larger questions here about how the French state chooses to allocate resources

[00:10:49] and what the consequences might be for unallocating resources. And actually, education is a really interesting case study of this because for a long time now, the French state has used higher education as a way of absorbing young people who otherwise would be unemployed. So essentially, the trade-off is rather than having these people drain the state by being unemployed and claiming benefits,

[00:11:15] we are allowing them to have heavily subsidized higher education instead. So these are larger calculations that are being made. And the trade-offs are difficult. Not everybody agrees on what they should be. And can France do that on its own or does it need either the European Union or perhaps the European Central Bank to step in? Because to look and say, well, you know, we've been there before with Greece. I mean, the effect of the crisis in Greece, of course, was a lot of people left. You had a brain drain.

[00:11:44] I think it's about half a million people left the country. I mean, it's quite staggering the consequences of that. France wouldn't want to go down that road, would it? No, and I think we're still somewhere away from the Greek case or indeed the Spanish case as well, where you saw aggressive austerity measures being imposed and clear brain drain. I mean, France has quite a lot of assets. It has a strong industrial base. Rates of productivity are quite high in France.

[00:12:13] And it's a very internationalised economic landscape leading in some sectors, at least at the European level. So aerospace engineering, pharmaceuticals, tech as well. French tech has come along a lot in the last sort of decade. So the incentives for leaving are quite low. And, of course, if you leave, if you work in France and then you leave,

[00:12:38] you lose a lot of the benefits, in particular, of course, the pension provision, state pension provisions, which are extremely generous and do really support French people in their world. Yeah, and for French people, they'd also find themselves living in places surrounded by people who are not French, which, you know, would be a big problem. Major disaster. Some would say, of course, though, I mean, I'm picking up on that. Part of the problem, as across Europe, is a problem of migration or perceived migration.

[00:13:07] And this is certainly what the far right, Marine Le Pen, has been riding on to some extent in France, as many other European countries facing something similar. So, I mean, let's talk about the political complexion of all this, because one of the interesting things, to me at least, is the polarisation that you have people like Mélenchon on the far left, it seems very popular. A lot of, you know, backing for the latest protests as well. And at the same time, a lot of French people going, well, if they can't keep order on the streets,

[00:13:36] then we're going to back the far right even more. And Marine Le Pen looking poised for the presidency next year. I mean, what's going on in the political world? Well, the political world in France is really characterised by a really odd combination of extreme stasis and extreme polarisation. And the stasis comes from the fact that the 2024 elections, which were snap elections called by Macron parliamentary elections, which no one expected them. Even I didn't expect them.

[00:14:05] No one saw this coming. So he took everyone by surprise. And these elections resulted in a very narrow majority for a kind of hodgepodge left-wing coalition. And what happened was that Macron refused to allow that coalition to form a government and to appoint a prime minister, which is actually the president's prerogative. So under the kind of political structures of the Fifth Republic,

[00:14:31] the president is the one who makes the government happen and is able to hire and fire the prime minister. So Macron didn't allow the left to form a government. And so instead you had a succession of centrists, centre-right prime ministers who, one succeeding the other, and governments falling apart every few months. We've now reached a period where it's kind of too late for anybody.

[00:14:58] It's not worth challenging any of these sort of slightly lame duck governments anymore because there are big elections coming in 2027. But what it means is that since 2024, there hasn't really been any proper political discussion, particularly around the budget. And so the budget has been extended by decree, but it hasn't really been negotiated in parliament. And parliament itself has been weakened by the whole experience

[00:15:28] of essentially being disempowered by Macron. So you've got this weird stasis where people are waiting for next year. And at the same time, you have this, what appears to be an acceleration of that polarisation process. Lain Le Pen holding her own despite the court cases that swirl around her. She's determined that the best way to fight is to go forward into politics

[00:15:56] and away from the legal system. So it's very much kind of the Donald Trump model. You know, if you get elected, then you're fine. And so she's taken control of her party. She's now going to, she's clearly put her second in command, Jordan Bardella, on the back seat. She's getting ready for the election. And then Jean-Luc Mélenchon is, of course, benefiting from a significant social protest. And in between, there are a raft of candidates and personalities,

[00:16:25] none of whom seem to be able to grab the attention of the public from all the few weeks. So there's a lot of flux and a lot of uncertainty. But in the UK, it's very clear, isn't it? The, you know, the move to the right is all about people arriving on boats. It's the immigration issue. So is it the same in France? Is that the number one concern for the Moon and the Pen supporters? Because if you actually look at the population makeup, and these are the official numbers of people actually living in the country,

[00:16:52] the number of people who are actually born overseas is quite low in France. But I guess that's not counting the people who are camped out trying to get residency in the country, which is probably the concern for the Marine Le Pen supporters. Yeah, and the statistics actually, I mean, it's really interesting. The statistics themselves are very different to those in other European countries because the French state prohibits the collection of statistics on ethnic grounds. So no state agency is actually allowed to collect statistics of the kind

[00:17:21] that you would easily find, for instance, in the UK. And so that, the statistic you quoted, which is to do with those who are born abroad, doesn't really capture the kind of diversity of French society because many of the people who are in the firing line, and shall we say the far right, were born in France. And indeed, in my case, their parents were born in France as well, their grandparents. So actually, you're not getting a full picture. France itself is an extremely diverse country,

[00:17:51] a country that has been a home for immigrants for 150 years, if not longer, depending on how you think about it. And multiple waves of migration, multiple waves of settlement, and different kinds of assimilation, depending on where people came from. So, you know, a huge Portuguese and Spanish migrant community in France as a result of, you know, the dictatorships in those countries. And of course, a large post-colonial migrant population

[00:18:19] related to France's empire in West Africa and North Africa. And yeah, I mean, the important thing to say politically is that the Front National as it was then, the Rassemblement National as it is today, Marine Le Pen's party, the far right party, is very old party. It goes back all the way to the 1970s. And its bedrock has always been a criticism, an attack, a frontal attack on the notion of France

[00:18:48] as an open, tolerant, accepting country. And that goes back to the 1980s, when those who led the party really hammered the Socialist Administration for being a lax about immigration. So that is really a key foundation for the party's success. But I think it's really significant to say that in recent electoral cycles, what you've seen is a huge expansion

[00:19:14] in the potential support base for the party coming from demographically, coming from middle-aged, hard-working families. So that's the profile, that's the kind of demographic profile that seems the most rapid increase in far-right vote. And those people, they're often working low-paid jobs, they often drive cars, they have families, children,

[00:19:41] and they feel that they are being squeezed. And that sense of resentment, which is being squeezed economically, but also in their mind being squeezed by immigrants and being taxed a lot, because, you know, they work, so they're being taxed, that's really driven the increase of support for the far-right. Right. But that sounds exactly like Farage supporters, doesn't it, though? Or even Donald Trump supporters for exactly the same issues. It is, although, I mean,

[00:20:12] the question, I suppose, is how we define, you know, who the working class are today. And these people, who I just described, they're not a kind of classic vision of the industrial working class that formed the bedrock of left-wing politics in the 20th century. These people often work in, you know, in the private sector, or they work as, you know, they have small businesses and so on. And so they're kind of trying to work out

[00:20:41] exactly what their priorities are and exactly how they see the world is really quite important and quite significant. And I think it's difficult to say it's the same as elsewhere. So the students who are protesting, so they wouldn't be necessarily protesting about immigration, though, would they? Or would they? Because that would be different from everywhere. else, wouldn't it? Because normally the younger people would be more open to a more liberal attitude towards immigration. And, you know, this started with student protests. Absolutely. The current movement began

[00:21:11] with school students. I think it's really important to emphasize how young many of these children are. I mean, they're 15, 16, 17. They're not even university students. And the protests began, the very first protests began in Mayotte, which is an overseas territory of France in the Indian Ocean. And then moved to schools in relatively deprived areas of suburban Paris and then very quickly spread all across France. And so for these kids,

[00:21:41] it's the opposite. Immigration was not at all on their radar. And in fact, for many of them, they have experienced, you know, they have experienced racism or their parents have experienced racism, or their families have. And so part of what gives their protests the kind of intensity that we've seen, like the kind of anger that we've seen, is that they're able to anchor their very material complaints about teachers and school buildings in a much larger story about deprivation and exclusion.

[00:22:10] So, Emil, you've got a situation where you've got, as you say, the working, if you call them working class, hardworking families, I suppose is often a term used in British politics, moving towards Marine Le Pen. You've got the students, and to some extent, I suppose, some of the trade unions moving perhaps, it seems, further to the left behind Mélenchon. What actually happens next year? Do we see, as the polls seem to clearly suggest, Marine Le Pen on a bit of a run, really, a landslide, potentially?

[00:22:40] Or is it much more mixed? I mean, are the left sufficiently organised to be able to counteract that? It's very mixed. It's very uncertain. I'm traditionally summoned to make predictions before big French electoral cycles, and that's been the case for the last 15, 20 years. But actually, I don't want to make any prediction because it seems to me that there are, there are, the polls right now are not really able to read the landscape. It's not that the polls are wrong,

[00:23:08] but it's the questions being asked to those who are polled is, they're not really real questions. So we can see that the support from Marine Le Pen is stable at around 30 to 35% in the first round. And that's consistent with long-standing trends. So we can expect her to get roughly that amount, that proportion of the vote in the first round. What will happen behind her is very, very uncertain. Can Mélenchon

[00:23:37] sustain this level of support? He has already reached 20% in the past, so this is not, you know, wouldn't certainly be out of all possibility. But I think the much bigger question is who is the consensus candidate and what will that, who will that consensus candidate be? And at the moment, the polls, they're asking questions to people being polled about all these different political figures. We don't know how many of them will survive until,

[00:24:07] you know, the kind of election. We don't know how many of them will actually gain momentum. So traditionally what happens is that a consensus candidate emerges from the right or from the centre and is able to reach up towards the high teens, low 20s. That's what, that's what kind of history would suggest. But given the long-standing destructuring of the French

[00:24:36] political landscape under Macron was systematically sought to kind of neuter the centre-right and centre-left parties, and this is part of a kind of strategy of his that he had from, normally he was elected in 2017, it is possible that they simply won't be able to field a single candidate or no single candidate would emerge, which then would leave a runoff between these two figures. And at that point, it's very unclear what happens

[00:25:05] because that is not how the French Fifth Republic was set up. it wasn't set up to have a runoff between two extremes. That was not the model, right? So how voters will behave and respond is extremely unclear. So whichever way it's going to be, this turbulence is going to continue then, isn't it? Because the government is going to induce further turbulence, possibly through a complete term of government before people see sense and sort of move towards the middle again. Yes, and bear in mind that in 2027 there are multiple elections,

[00:25:35] so that's why I call an electoral cycle is a presidential election. But now, and this has been the case for quite a few decades, the parliament will be dissolved and there'll be parliamentary elections behind. So immediately after the presidential election there'll be parliamentary elections and it could be that Marine Le Pen would win the presidency but then that her party would be harshly sanctioned in the parliamentary elections that follow, which would lead to

[00:26:03] an unprecedented situation where a president is not given a governing majority, right? So the idea here is that you give the, once the president is elected, the president then gets a governing majority but that might not be the case. So again, we're really in uncharted territory. Well, we've had that before with cohabitation or whatever, cohabitation, I think. Well, cohabitation has happened when parliament has been dissolved off cycle or when parliament has been dissolved at the end of its term

[00:26:30] because until the 2000s, presidential terms were seven years but parliamentary terms were five years. So there was necessarily a point at which the parliament would be dissolved before the president had to step down. And so often that was when you got the victory of another, of the party that was not the president's party. And so then you get cohabitation. We've never had a situation where the election immediately following the presidential election, the parliamentary election

[00:26:59] has yielded a different result to the presidential election. So it seems to me, I'm looking at this from the outside, you are obviously a lot more French than I am, but it seems to me that a big part of this is the question about how the lifestyle is being challenged. So as you say, the economy's intrinsically not that bad. It's got debt issues. It needs the ECB or the European Union to somehow step in and help reduce that cost of borrowing so that it doesn't steam your all out of control.

[00:27:28] But I mean, they like to retire as early as possible. They have more savings than most other European countries. It seems like the French are quite well set up for we want to have a good life and we want to have a good later life and we don't want any of that to be challenged. Is that a fair call? And if they see the cost of living increasing and they see that ability to have this good third part of their life enjoying the French countryside and the French food

[00:27:58] and the French seaside, I mean, you've got it all in France, haven't you really? If they feel like they can't partake in all of that because the cost of living has got out of control and having to delay their retirement, that would not sit well with most people. Yeah, I mean, I think, look, the way to think about this is to think about what kind of social contract exists in different countries and, you know, so I live in the UK

[00:28:25] and one of the great, you know, untouched institutions is the National Health Service and wherever you go, whichever politician you listen to, very few of them will openly attack the National Health Service or suggest that it should be fully privatised and, you know, the thing's happening, of course, but there are reforms taking place and there is, to some extent, stealth privatisation but the NHS remains a core part of what the British think of as a social contract. The state provides

[00:28:55] this extraordinarily free at the point of service health system and I think you can see the pension scheme in France, state pension scheme is something similar to that. It's considered to be part of what makes France, France, so actually the retirement age, there's a lot of fixation on the retirement age. In France, it's quite complicated because you can only get a full pension after a certain number of years of contribution and very few people,

[00:29:25] unless you start working at the age of 17, will actually have reached that by the lowest possible retirement age. So in many cases, the French are actually working as much as their European counterparts. It's just that in theory, they might have the possibility retiring early, but they don't have the right number of years of contribution to do so. But Emil, with Marine Le Pen, I mean, as you say, you can argue about how luxurious the pension scenario would be, but that's not something Marine Le Pen,

[00:29:55] if she became president, would tackle, is it? I mean, fundamentally, the things we're talking about, the relatively comfortable life, the level of service, that is not something her supporters would want to change. Well, that's one of the real difficulties for her, because under the last few years, she's been, you know, grooming Jordan Bardella, her second in command, to be a potential prime minister. And he has very actively courted France's right-wing electorate, because in terms of the overall electoral

[00:30:24] calculation, he and the party have realised that the only way they can win is if they get conservatives, French conservatives, to vote for them. And so he has developed and pushed quite a strong pro-business, anti-welfare line, which has now found its way into the electoral programme for Marine Le Pen's presidential campaign. So she's facing a real issue here about how she presents herself over the next six months, because if she continues

[00:30:54] to present herself in this very protectionist mode, which has been her sort of calling card for the last 10 years, she's not going to be able to bring on board those conservative voters who in France do very much think that the French are spoiled children and should have, you know, less in the way of state services. But of course, if she pushes that line too hard, which is there in her programme, she's going to lose those hard-working

[00:31:23] families who really rely on, for instance, subsidies for petrol and diesel, or who rely on local public services like schools. So actually, she's facing her own balancing act and it doesn't only come down to immigration. And how much of this is just a short-term result that the rest of the world is seeing the economy being hit by what's been happening in the Gulf and, you know, the consequences of a world responding to Donald Trump? There's obviously geopolitical factors

[00:31:53] and, I mean, it would be silly to discount those. I mean, there are some French specificities. Something I talk about occasionally is energy. As you perhaps know, the French electricity grid is 70% derived from nuclear power and the development of kind of civil nuclear technology in France after the war was all about energy autonomy. It was all about keeping costs low. That was what was promised

[00:32:23] to the French. That's why they were told they were having these big nuclear power stations built in their backyard. And so the shock of the Ukraine crisis and the rapid rise of electricity prices, that's another way in which the social contract has been broken in a specifically French way. For the French were told, install electric heating in your homes because electricity will always be cheap and then it turns out that actually electricity prices are dependent on a wholesale market. So there are some things which have a kind of French character to them but, of course, a larger context is clearly driven by geopolitics.

[00:32:52] And what about the European context as well? Because we haven't really touched, we said, you know, to some extent France is going to depend on the EU economically potentially and certainly through the ECB. But Marine Le Pen again has to some extent traded on being a bit of a Euro fan. Yes, although she's backed away from Frexit and from flirting with Frexit. I mean, that was something which two electoral cycles ago she pushed quite hard and she fired the guy who came up with that sort of campaign platform.

[00:33:22] So she's pulled away from that quite a lot. I think that there is no sense that there is a real Eurosceptic candidate out there in 2027. There are different critiques of the European Union from Mélenchon and from Marine Le Pen but nothing that is equivalent to British Euroscepticism in the run-up to 2016. So if there, I mean, there's not a vote and it sounds like there never would be but would most French people vote to stay in the EU? Does it embrace being part of Europe?

[00:33:52] I think so. I mean, I think that would be the multiple dimensions to this but I find it hard to imagine that even at their most embittered and angry the French would vote to leave the European Union. Of course, in 2005 the French did kill the project for European Constitution and it was more or less that referendum in France that killed the project in that specific form. But the other thing of course

[00:34:21] is that France is one of the major founding partners of the European project as it stands and France leaving would, I mean, I'd be tempted to say it would mean the end of the European Union. I mean, maybe that puts too much to France but the Franco-German axis is the kind of central dynamo economic and political of European integration. So the idea that this would be up for grabs in a referendum that would take really serious political changes

[00:34:51] I don't see on the horizon. So does all this, I mean, it seems like it's a bit of a storm in a teacup, doesn't it? Because as you said, you know, the French economy isn't actually doing that badly. I mean, it's got a higher level of debt than many other European countries but its debt is not, you know, crippling and people are suffering because, like everywhere else, the cost of living has increased. Government services are getting challenged because they don't want to spend but all that could be fixed

[00:35:19] if there was a resolution to the cost of borrowing which the ECB could do. I mean, they've looked at and talked about various debt instruments but effectively it means, well, let's bring that cost of borrowing down because the European Central Bank will say, we'll tell you what, we'll buy a whole load of French bonds. Sorry everybody else, we're not buying yours but it will solve this particular problem and get France out of this crisis so long as France says, well look, we'll try and spend a bit less going forward so that would be the pact and, you know, you sort of, in the way Europe works

[00:35:49] they'd sort of bumble their way through that, the cost of borrowing would come down, inflation around the world is going to come down, that's going to bring down the cost of borrowing anyway as we hopefully see an end to what's going on in the Gulf and in Ukraine and we see the end of all of this. It's just, is it a storm in a teacup? Are we going to look in a year's time and go, well, you know, it was a hot summer, everyone got a bit antsy but it's all over now. We might, we might

[00:36:18] but I think, I think the reason it'll have longer lasting consequences is because it raises really difficult political questions that are not specifically French questions but are perhaps more intensely felt and expressed in the French context. So for example, the questions over pension reform are really about intergenerational transfer of wealth and how France and other European economies deal with,

[00:36:47] you know, the rise of a class of asset holders who also happen to be very old and the kind of consequences that have, how that has for young people. Those sorts of political questions which I think you can see in some of the protests right now which are overwhelmingly driven by young people. Those questions are not going to go away so it might be possible to stabilize the bond markets and my sense is very much that this, the bond storm

[00:37:17] is a storm in a teacup but these questions of, you know, intergenerational distribution of wealth or, you know, how we manage inheritance or how we manage, you know, healthcare or how schools respond to this sort of slow blow crisis that's been happening since the pandemic and the kind of which tore through the entire school system in Europe and, you know, led to an epidemic of absenteeism and, you know, inability to kind of rectify kind of social problems through school.

[00:37:47] I mean, these are bigger political questions and in fact the reality is that because the French go out on the streets and because the French protest at a moment's notice it does mean that France is often the focal point. I was really struck by the fact that there have been huge protests in India at the same time which have had quite a lot of coverage but the protests in France because they were happening in France drew kind of international attention to this question that just wasn't

[00:38:17] happening until that point. Yes, so in a sense here we are une tempête dans un verre d'eau apparently that is the translation of a stormy You're just here You're just here I'm showing off entirely Let's do something on France so I can just show I can speak a bit of French We are being played You do realise that Emil Émile, thank you very much for doing that storm in a glass of water which apparently is a literal translation of that We'll see if it is indeed that

[00:38:47] Perhaps when we next talk it'll be President Le Pen and we'll have to revise all our opinions Do you think that is the final question Do you think that will happen? Do you think that is the most likely outcome? My sense is not I think she will struggle to get beyond 44, 45, 46% in the second round The vote transfers would have to be huge for her to I mean the electoral sociology is quite complicated in France because it's a two round system and I think that would be

[00:39:17] it would be something of a surprise much less of a surprise than in previous electoral cycles but it would be something of a surprise what I don't underestimate is a level of panic in Europe and I've been talking to policy makers recently talking to people who are in and out of Brussels and the idea of France governed by Le Pen that really does scare many people at a kind of European level so whether or not those fears are justified the symbolism would be very powerful okay well Emile

[00:39:47] thank you very much merci bien and we will perhaps come back Eve at that moment and talk to you further about all this absolutely with pleasure avec plaisir thanks very much indeed take care cheers thank you thanks so much thanks bye we should say Émile's got a book out it's just about to come out as well just called France I think yes I think it's been out already but anyway it's a very nice brief idea for people who don't know French perhaps yeah well there we are

[00:40:16] I must get myself un copy of that then un ou un there you see straight away I don't know yeah well there we are you see it's a complicated language isn't it so next week are we getting close to the point of peak human yes because the signs are that the population crisis everyone thought 50 years ago thought we were going to be absolutely deluging the planet we wouldn't be able to survive because too many people but it does look now

[00:40:46] as if across the world we are getting close to peak human well I mean even though we are living longer there's fewer of us getting born because young people seem to have lost interest in sex I think that's a big part of it so the fertility rate has really fallen well below what most people were expecting whether that's technology that's driving that or it's just a different societal attitude or whatever is the root cause of it or glue about the future I certainly know young people who say

[00:41:15] well I don't want to bring a child into this world frankly with the climate crisis and everything else so anyway it's having an effect and that's what we're going to look at yeah the changing shape of the global demography next week on the Y Curve so join us for that we'll see you then the Y Curve you you you you