 Good afternoon everybody, my name is Barry Colfer and I'm the director of research here at the Institute of International and European Affairs, the IEA in Dublin. I'm very pleased to welcome you to this webinar entitled, En va au maintenant, the post election French political landscape. This event follows up on a great meeting we had in April that looked at the implications of the 2022 French presidential elections with our distinguished panel, who I'll introduce in a moment. And our meeting today will focus on the French legislative elections which took place in June. And our speakers are going to consider what this might mean for the future of France for Ireland and indeed for the European Union. And we are delighted to be joined today by two of Ireland's preeminent experts on France, Lara Marlowe, Paris correspondent at the Irish Times, and Dr Emmanuel Sean Quinlivan lecture in European politics at UCC. We greatly appreciate both speakers again taking time out of their busy schedules to be with us to discuss France and where the Republic goes from here after these tumultuous elections. Lara and Emmanuel will speak for approximately 10 minutes each, and then we will go to questions and answers with her audience you'll be able to join the discussion as usual using the Q&A function on Zoom, which you should see on your screens. Please feel free to send any questions in throughout the session as they occur to you, and we'll get through as many of them, once our speakers have concluded their remarks are reminded that today's presentation and Q&A are both on the record. As always, please feel free to join the discussion on Twitter using the handle at IIEA. But before formally introducing our speakers, and indeed before handing the floor over to them, I want to briefly present the electoral landscape as of today. So I'm going to share my screen very briefly. No. So just before we get into business, I hope this will be useful to prevent our speakers from having to paint a picture. This is the composition of the 16th National Assembly. We have 10 political groups lit across three broad groupings. The centre led by President Macron and his renaissance, formerly the Republic on Marsh Party, and allied groups. These remain the largest in Parliament, but have lost their overall majority and now lead in a minority capacity. So it's the yellow bit there in the middle. On the far left in purple, we have the loose intergroup known as NUP, and I was just discussing with our speakers before the varying pronunciations you can have in French, but I will refer to them as NUP, which are the new ecological and social People's Union, which is formed of the La France Insoumise, the socialists, the ecologists and the communists led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who seemed like an insurgent winner of the election, but they already may be fracturing. On the right, it's worth pointing to the third grouping we have after the research for the Assemblyman National under Mahine Le Pen to their best ever results, and due to the failure of the NUP to form a single group. Now the largest single opposition party in Parliament are indeed the Assemblyman National as I expect our speakers may refer to. So to formally introduce our speakers, Lara Marlowe is a Paris based foreign correspondent for the Irish Times and as a journalist for more than three decades working for Time magazine, the Irish Times and others. In Paris, the Middle East, and in Washington DC, she is a recipient of the Lesion Donner and has written three books including her most recent Love in a Time of War with Apollo Press. I'm sure many of you will know Lara as well for her excellent and fearless reportage from Ukraine over the course of this recent horrible conflict. Dr Emmanuel Jean-Claude Le Pen, as mentioned is a lecturer in European politics at the Department of Government ECC, where she teaches French politics, comparative politics and European policymaking. Dr Jean-Claude Le Pen also holds a chair in active European citizenship and as the director of ECC's hub in active European citizenship. Thank you both again for being with us and I'll hand first over to Lara. Lara the floor is yours after 10 minutes over to Manuel. Thanks both. Thank you very. I thought I would start with talking about the news today, which is the Uberleaks scandal and Emmanuel Macron's implication if you like in that scandal both the Rassemblement National and NUPS or NUPS are demanding a commission of inquiry in the National Assembly over Macron's role. As you know, I think it was something like 124,000 documents released by an Irishman who was a lobbyist for Uber. And this just confirms what many, many French think that Emmanuel Macron is the president of the rich that he's a sort of Trojan horse for big capital for multinationals. And so and so it is creating a very uncomfortable position for Macron. It turns out that in 2014 and 15, when he was the minister for the economy, he negotiated a secret deal with Uber to help to deregulate the French taxi sector. And so this is, this is really the main news story here today. Macron's kind of retort to that is he's gone somewhere I think in central France to open a semiconductor factory, showing that he is still the champion of high technology and so on. The Rassemblement National, the Le Pen's party is saying that he's the defender of the oligarchy, which obviously has resonance with war in Ukraine. He is certain to be questioned about this in his best deal day interview two days from now. The best quote I found was actually from Fabien Roussel, the communist deputy in the National Assembly who said that the President of the Republic wants to impose an American model of a start-up nation in France. Every time he chooses multinational corporations, the world of business over protecting the French. And another thing the French really hate lobbies. And this idea that Macron was in cahoots with the Uber lobby that they were making secret visits to his office at Bercy. I don't think it's going to change anyone's opinions of Macron, but it will certainly reinforce all of the stereotypes about him. Since, you know, I guess you could say that April 24, the day of his reelection was a very good day for Macron, but it has really been downhill since. There was a Kantar poll at the end of June, which showed that his approval rating had gone down for four successive months in a row. It went down six points in the last month alone. It went down 11 points since April. He's now at 32% opinion rating, which in France is not that bad, but it's not great. But at the same time Marine Le Pen has been going up and up and up and the same poll found that 39% of the French say that they want her to play a more important role in politics in the future. So what will the future be? There was a vote of no confidence yesterday staged by Melanchol's group by New Pest, which Elizabeth Bourne and the government won by a very wide margin they only got 146 people to vote against the government out of 577. But perhaps the most interesting thing was that six socialist members of the New Pest coalition abstained in that vote. And that just opens a tiny crack of possibility that in the future when Bourne is and the majority are trying to get those 39 votes that they desperately need to pass any legislation. Perhaps they can rely on a few socialists. Remember Elizabeth Bourne came from the Socialist Party, and there are other former members of the socialist in Macron's coalition. For example, Clément Bourne, who a lot of Irish people would know as someone who's very hibernophile who went to TCD and is now the transport minister. But I think that the lesson of the confidence vote and also the other main news which I'll come back to in a moment which is the law on cost of living in the National Assembly. The lesson of all this is that parliamentary politics is back in France. It had pretty much been anesthetized for the first for Macron's first term because he had such a large majority that nothing really happened here. And although it's happened in a fairly brutal way and although a lot of people are shocked that the far right has two vice presidencies of the National Assembly, that New Pest, the far left have the presidency at the Finance Commission. Despite all this, I hear around me in government among government people, politicians, analysts everything. People say this is a healthy thing. This is actually good for French democracy. The other thing that's back is the whole left right division. I remember that Macron said that it was it no longer had any meaning that the, you know, this was the la fin du clivage politique, and what the debate on the, the no confidence vote showed is that there really is a left right division in France. Well, I will new best with the opposition actually manage to overwhelm Macron, I don't think so, because the main reason for that is that new pass, and the assemble on SNL are pretty much incompatible. They don't really agree on anything and I have a completely different approach to being in opposition. I think that the new group wants respectability. And for example, she's told her deputy or 89 deputies, they must wear suits and ties, they must dress, you know, in a very conventional manner. They even said that the reason they didn't vote to censor the government was that they want to act to help French people, not to create problems for the government. If the new pass before left people, the objective is really to create as much problems for Macron as they can. The danger for Marine Le Pen, of course, is that they will seem be seen to be too conciliatory to be helping Macron and that people who voted for the new PRN will move to new pass because above all they hate Macron. So, you know, it's its obstructionist attitude versus a constructive attitude that will be something to watch to see how that plays out in any case and anti Macron United Front is I think, very unlikely and they disagree on everything they disagree on the nature of the French public on fighting racism and Islamophobia on gender discrimination on class struggle the environment so that they don't really agree on anything. They also both they have the same goal, which is to prove themselves as what's the word credible alternatives to Macron. They're thinking about the the 2027 presidential election, which a lot of people think it's the only election that really matters in France. So they're thinking about that already. In her on July 6 so six days ago, Elizabeth born gave her general policy speech, and by all virtually all analysts thought she came through it with flying colors, they praised her seriousness her capacity. She had to speak over a lot of shouting and heckling and that sort of thing. So she performed very well under pressure. Born is also having to cope with for men who who the Le Monde called crocodiles, who are in a sense her rivals, these are very high ranking people, either, you know, close to Macron, whatever, and they would be very popular Bruno Le Maire the finance minister who announced his own, the fact that he was being returned in the new when there was a cabinet shuffle recently. He announced himself he didn't leave it to the Prime Minister's office to announce it. I guess it's a promotion or lateral move I'm not sure from interior minister has now become the budget minister and rising star also from the right. Edouard Philippe the former Prime Minister who as he never fails to remind everyone is the most popular politician in France. Francois Bagel, the leader of Modem, who is is not in the in the cabinet but who is is influential he's kind of an old timer. So she's under pressure from all these people. The program which born outlined in her general policy speech had nothing new in it. She's sticking to pension reform which Macron had announced ages and ages ago, but she remained very vague about the age at which the French will retire. She says that this administration will absorb some of Francis horrendous budget deficit, but without raising taxes. And that's kind of hard to square with the fact that they're promising another 20 billion euro in spending on cost of living measures. So the only thing that seems to have changed is the, the aspiration for a new method. I think that Macron has said that he will not, he will abandon his top down style the vertical government if you like. It is about born promise to share power at every level national and local. I have, I'm a little bit skeptical about the extent to which that will happen because I think every president I can remember promise to decentralize and share power and son and they just don't doesn't happen. This week, there is a debate in the National Assembly on a new law on cost of living. And I think this is kind of a taste of things to come because, although there's a consensus in France, among all the political parties that times are hard that inflation is high. There's no cost or going up and so on. There's no consensus in the National Assembly about passing this law there have been more than 600 amendments already filed. The Rapporteur for the Budget Committee says that they would if all of these amendments were passed, it would amount to 100 billion euro in additional expenditure. I think Emmanuel Macron can probably forget about reducing the deficit. Gabriel Atal, who the new budget minister I mentioned a minute ago has said that France has gone from what he long court, whatever it cost, which was the slogan during the pandemic, or which is still with us unfortunately to come back to how much will it cost. And finally, I mean if it gets really, really messy for Macron, he could use what is called the the the atom bomb the nuclear weapon of French politics, which would be to dissolve the National Assembly and call a new election. I don't think he will do that it would it would have to be very desperate indeed. Because the French are very unpredictable and there's no guarantee whatsoever that they will vote the same way next time that they voted last time. And there is a precedent which was Jacques Chirac who in 1997 on the urging of Dominique de Villepin dissolve the National Assembly, and it backfired on him and he had to cohabit for five years with the socialist. So I think that we're headed for five difficult years messy years in a way, but I would like to quote my colleague, Ruan McCormack of the Irish Times who wrote in one of his columns that what the French call ungovernable other Europeans call politics. I don't wish to end Lara. This whole piece about the cost of living it's obviously so kind of pertinent throughout Europe but you know it took such a vivid form in France over the past five years with the digital zone and that whole kind of movement and we may come back to it because I do want a manual to come in. That's alright but I'd be really interested to hear about that whether that's likely to such a movement is likely to reform or research but I'm digressing manual would you like to take the floor. I'm just going to start maybe to go back to take us back five years ago and five years ago the IEA invited our deeply missed colleague Robert LG to comment on the results of the legislative elections actually. And Robert delivered a kind of speculative talk about the the French party system where I might go in the next five years. And here we are in 2022 and I'm sure you won't be surprised to hear that Robert, as usual was actually spot on. So Melanchol indeed now owns what Robert called this large alternative left space and he foresaw Robert foresaw the 21st century union of the left moment, which Melanchol managed to achieve. Everybody was surprised by this by the way that between the presidential election and the legislative election, Melanchol managed to create this new pass. I'm going to pronounce the S by the way I know the Academy Française said not to pronounce it but I want the social to be in there. Robert also foresaw the decline of the socialist party to irrelevance. And Robert also pointed to the continuing struggle of the republicans in terms of positioning between Macron and Le Pen. So we concluded at the time in 2017 that actually the win of La République en March signaled the beginning of the change of the French party system and actually not the end. One element he didn't foresee at which Lara mentioned and which actually nobody saw coming was the strength of the Rassemblement National in the legislative election. If you followed the campaign, even when my Le Pen was, you know, interviewed at the very start of the campaign. You had Melanchol kind of doing his great coup of pushing people to elect the Prime Minister, which obviously you don't do in a semi presidential system, but he sold it to the people. And my Le Pen was like, this is silly. We're aiming, you know, we have eight MPs in the outgoing National Assembly, we're aiming to create a group, which is at 15. So she was aiming for about 2025. And as Lara mentioned, Barry, she now has 89. So and that was without any alliance with Debout La France or Les Républicains or nothing on its own merit and in a two-round majoritarian electoral system. This is quite, quite an achievement. Her dad managed to get about 35 MPs but when Mitterrand had introduced some proportional representation system to the electoral system. So I just want to draw maybe three kind of lessons from this political period in France. I divided into three categories, the electoral lessons, the governmental lessons and the policy lessons. Just on the electoral lessons, I mean, Lara has mentioned a lot of them. We were, I think we were all surprised how little Macron campaigned. He waited 22 days to appoint the Prime Minister. And he just assumed what Robert had actually pointed out in 2017 that there is always a honeymoon, more or less rosy, but always a honeymoon period following the presidential election and that the president necessarily will have an absolute majority or an overall majority. He also announced, as Lara mentioned now, but he announced in between the two elections that he would adopt a new way of governing, but he didn't give any details. And I think that was quite crucial for the new pass for for the green side, etc. Like again, no details. He mentioned it and then off he went. The level, something that was mentioned is the level of participation, which was extremely low, less than one in two voters went out to vote. It was higher in 2017, but this time the voters knew a lot was at stake. So a participation seems to settle in the last two elections at below 50%, which is again a worrying trend which Macron had highlighted in 2017, but has done very, very little to combat. The left appears strong. So when you look at it on the face of this, you think, wow, a new pass really scored high, well done. But actually, if you add all the, you know, the scores of each party, it is the fifth worst score in the fifth republic for the left block. So you can say that, you know, it's an amazing result. It actually isn't. And in that deal, the Socialist Party lost its soul, like it really sold away, you know, things that seem to be values that seem to be very significant and entered, and I'm going to come back to this later on, but entered this deal with a clearly anti-European party or group, you know, that one way or another wants to frex it. I mean, there's no kind of way around it. The republicans lost half their MPs, but they will be, they should, they can be, they should be, they might be, the king makers. They have to navigate this as Robert highlighted in 2017. They have, they have to navigate this line between being too complacent and giving too much to Macron or appearing as rejecting decisions that they would take themselves actually, you know, on pension reform, they would, they would completely support Macron's views, if not more than that actually. And the Assemblement National is finally positioned if it plays its current right to access power in five years time. This is really, I think, something that needs to be watched. You know, in the past, every media in France and abroad, and I've been asked several times, oh, will Bahia Le Pen win? No. Mathematically, it was no, it wasn't possible and etc. This time, I'm actually worried. I just think like she has everything, not that she has done much, but she has everything in her power to win. So first of all, you know, when Robert gave his talk, he was highlighting how the Assemblement National was divided. You had Marion Marichal Le Pen, who was in the shadows and she might come back, she might enter, etc. But Marion now has left and is with Eric Zemour in Reconquête. She won't come back. And Reconquête was a huge flop, at least in this election. You know, Eric Zemour argued that Le Pen was associated with failure, failure, failure election after election. This legislative election was a huge success for the Le Pen's. And now she has, Marion Le Pen has 89 MPs. As Lara mentioned, she gave clear instructions, they have to be polite, they have to be civil, they have to wear a suit, a tie. They have to appear respectable, credible. She has five years to build a team to show that it's not only her, that she will have the manpower, she will have the people. And I'm sure, little by little, some of the républicains like Eric Zemour might pivot towards her, and she might really extend as Mélenchon kind of, you know, gobbled up the socialist party. I think she could swallow up the kind of further right wing of the républicain. So I think she is in an ideal position and she knows it. And the idea that she's not, she wasn't strong enough on immigration, that you know she missed the usual themes of the Rassemblement National. That actually played very well with her electorate. So she is the danger for the next five years. And as I said, so if you look at New Pest plus Rassemblement National de Boulat-France and a few others extreme right, you have about one in two voters who voted for a party that advocates leaving or disobeying etc. The European Union rules and not complying, not playing ball basically in the European Union. And this is also something that is worrying that is absolutely not discussed in France I find it quite surprising that it's absolutely under the radar nobody mentions it. We focus on other things but but certainly not this. Nobody seemed to be surprised that there were that many, you know, voters who voted for anti-European parties. There are governmental lessons quite short. So my point is about 40 43 seats short of an absolute majority. He tried and he's a bit born clearly made public that she tried to speak to the different groups and to the different political parties to create a coalition government as a very clear is that actually most European democracies function like this, not France. France is is still kind of functioning on this idea of an absolute or an overall majority and a government that has full power. I compact a woman and Prime Minister. There were talks that after the results of the legislative election he might get rid of her that would have been a huge mistake. So he didn't. She's been attacked for being technocratic. Quite boring quite cold. It's interesting and I think it could play in her favor and in my cause favor therefore she's not too political. She's an engineer. She's from Polytechnic. Whereas we've had only enough people largely enough lawyers, you know, so she's more in the doing, rather than the talking. She could really and she's well known for being a good negotiator. So she could be the right woman not too politically identified and now she's picked a government very much to her image. So no big figures, apart from, as Lara mentioned, Gerald Damana and the mayor. But you know, not apart from that, you know, the other like Minister for Health and etc and not too politically strong. So we can discuss the Minister for Education which created a few waves actually, or who created a few ways and he was appointed, but we'll wait and see. And really French political culture isn't about making deals. There was no, you know, government agreement in advance of the speech on general policy speech that born delivered. I mentioned the leaders of the parliamentary groups of, except for New Pest and Assemblyman National clearly trying to bring them in to kind of see where I'm focusing on compromise here and as Lara mentioned, certainly parliamentary politics is back in terms of, well, they have no choice but in terms of trying to construct and build compromises. And by last point will be on policy lessons. And nationally, I mean Lara mentioned a lot about the law and the cost of living. Macron is still aiming for his pension reform. He has to do a pension reform. Now it will be a very watered down version of what he has but if he doesn't, he will be the first president in 40 years not to have carried out a pension reform which is absolutely needed. He has to deal with inflation, obviously, but France has already and Lara mentioned all this but France is already probably over the 5% in terms of public deficit in 2022. So the German economy is in a huge, is in a significant difficult position with the massive reduction in Russian gas. If, like the, but the German economy collapses or not collapses but you know struggles deeply. You have ripple waves, and certainly all across Europe, but it will affect France obviously. So it's, it's a very difficult economic and therefore social time ahead of Macron at a European level because my point at the end of the day is, therefore the last pro European leader on on the on the spectrum. So France just finished its presidency of the council. It was deemed successful, which wasn't a given because France or not hasn't always had successful presidencies, but it was deemed quite successful with key decisions in the field of the environment you had obviously the digital market act and the digital market act that were passed and that was, that was important to universal charges decision was was agreed minimum wage in all member states and etc etc so the strategic compass and obviously and very important symbolically for Macron as well, given what he had been, what he said about Ukraine and Russia and etc but the candidate status was granted to Ukraine and Moldova during the French presidency. And as we remember the Romanian president and the and draggy and Macron went to deliver the news to to Ukraine. So just to conclude, Macron. Okay, Macron has five very difficult years ahead of him. I was reading a piece and I kind of understand this as well, saying that the situation he's in now is worse than a cohabitation, because in a cohabitation he could be, he could, he would place himself as the referee, you know, above kind of daily politics. And he would let the PM deal with the mundane day to day policies in extremely difficult times. But here he's in probably the worst of both worlds actually. And if you remember in 2017 the time magazine did a cover page where you had a profile shot of Macron and the headline was, he wants to be the new leader of Europe and there was a little asterisk and then it said, if only he can lead France. I think that summarizes, you know, Macron's presidency from 2017 and probably until 2027. Macron cannot be reelected as well. So he's, he's a president, you know, like as, as Lara mentioned 2027 is already being discussed. Edouard Philippe is on the ranks, Gérald Darmanin, Bruno Le Maire, they're all competing for that spot. And, ultimately, I think there will be, yes parliamentary politics will be back, but as Lara mentioned the extremes, well, Nupès will be extremely disruptive. Clementine Autin had said during the presidential campaign, if Mélenchon is elected president, we will still carry on demonstrating and complaining in the streets. And I was like, writes so politics at its most difficult. The Republic won't want to compromise their future by appearing too complacent, as I said with Macron and the leader of the group, Olivier Marlex is a hardliner anti Macron. And Macron now has to prepare his legacy and I fear really that it will be a kind of Obama type legacy with Trump coming after Obama. I fear in 2027 we could be discussing Marine Le Pen president. That's it.