 Joining us from Paris is Judah Grundstein. He's the editor-in-chief of World Politics Review, and his podcast, Trend Lines, drops every Friday. Hello, Judah. You're joining us from Paris, right? That's right. A lot to discuss, obviously, Emmanuel Macron. I'm not pronouncing that properly, but that's the way I roll. I don't think he'd pronounce our names correctly either, though, so don't feel bad. So he won with about 64 percent of the vote, and Marine Le Pen took in fewer than 40 percent. She kind of tanked it, didn't she, at the last minute? Were they expecting it to be this bad for her? Well, it really depends how you look at it. To begin with, she took 21 percent in the first round. To give you an idea, that was already more than anyone from her party had ever taken in a presidential election. Basically, it's been her father and her. The party is sort of like a very lucrative family business that runs on anger and resentment. What do you mean it's lucrative? Well, I mean, it's how they make their living, between that and she's actually a member of the European Parliament. But they've been investigated for campaign financial fraud. Basically in France, any party over a certain percentage gets all of their campaign expenses reimbursed by the state. The FN has been investigated for basically contracting, let's say, they get their posters printed by someone who's a close associate of the party and he'll charge them twice as much as it actually costs to print the posters and then they'll get reimbursed by the state at the higher cost and the rest of the money gets kicked back. They've been fined for stuff like that, shenanigans like that. Are they getting rich off this? From what I understand, they're not out on the street. They've got like a nice family compound outside of Paris. But the difference between her father and Marine Le Pen is that her father, Jean-Marie, was always kind of happy with that arrangement. He never really sought to popularize the party or to win office. He was always happy there being the sort of gadfly of French politics. Lots of provocative, racist and anti-Semitic remarks over the years that were worse than dog whistle shout outs to his latent constituency. The difference is that Marine Le Pen, when she took over the party from him or when she inherited the party from him, she actually had this vision where she could sort of normalize the party, moderate its positions a little bit, weed out some of the more hateful stuff, and actually win elections and govern. And so what you saw happening, especially over the last few years, where immigration has become more and more of a high-profile issue here in France and then culminating in the terrorist attacks, which sort of served the law and order aspect of the FN's program. And then also some of the mounting resentment against Europe and the European Union. So she sort of used that to grow the party's appeal. At the same time, she distanced some of the more sort of visibly anti-Semitic people and racist people. And so when she got 21 percent in the first round, I think the highest that she'd ever gotten and her father had ever gotten was something like 17 percent. Now, to give you an idea, the difference is that in 2002, her father made it to the second round of the election. It was a seismic shock here. The entire country was in shock for about a week or two, maybe longer. He won something like 16 percent in the first round and won 17 percent in the second round. So there was this nationwide, what they called the Republican front that blocked his way and he only won one percent more votes in the second round in the first round. So for Marine Le Pen to go from 21 percent to 35, it shows that there is a much bigger pool of voters who will accept the National Front candidate as a second choice. Now, the problem is they kind of painted themselves in a corner because they kept they kind of got into this enthusiasm after the first round and expected to do a lot better. So they started talking about reaching a 40 percent threshold and they defined 40 percent as they're sort of cut off for being successful. So falling to 30, so only getting 35 percent, as you said, it definitely it's created a bit of a backlash within the party, actually. And so there's going to be a little bit of a falling out probably after the legislative elections in a month where some of the hardliners are going to say, see, we told you so. You shouldn't have moderated the position and others are going to say, well, we need to moderate a little more. The legislative elections are a month away and there are members of the National Front who serve in the parliament. Well, here's the thing. At this point, I think they have only two members of parliament. I think there's five hundred and sixty something or five hundred and seventy something members of parliament. They have two five hundred seventy seven, the way in which France's electoral system works. It's a two round first pass the poll, which means that after the all the candidates that make that win more than I think fifteen percent of the votes in the first round, make it into the second round. What's happened traditionally, there's no proportional representation at all. And so what's happened traditionally historically is that in any any voting districts where a FN candidate makes it into the second round and looks like they could possibly win if the other two major candidates stay in the race, the weaker of the other two candidates drops out. So the socialists will drop out and let a center right, what's called the Republicans Party win if they finished behind and vice versa. So the two major parties have effectively blocked the National Front from any sort of popular representation beyond the municipal and local level. Now what the problem this time is, or rather not necessarily the problem, it really depends how you look at it because clearly you have a party that has, they polled I think thirty five percent or thirty to thirty five percent in the last regional elections. The regions would be sort of like if you group together three or four states in America and there was an election between the state level and the federal level. So those are the regions in France. The National Front won about thirty five percent in the first round and didn't win a single region. And so they can regularly win twenty five thirty percent in various voting districts, sometimes more. There are some down south for instance where they win forty five percent of the vote in the first round, but they get no representation in parliament. So it's it's obviously anti anti-democratic in a certain way. What's what's happened now this time, and we can get into that a little later, is that because both of the major party candidates for the presidential election failed to make it into the second round. I have my doubts as to whether the system for blocking the National Front from representation in parliament will actually be as effective this this time. There's going to be a lot of divisions. A lot of people might just not want to sit out a second round because of the kind of losses that both of the major parties might be expected to accumulate. A lot of people sat out this election. Voter turnout was incredibly low, even though it was an important election. And a lot of people handed in blank ballots. What is that about? The protest well the protest vote even the protest vote was enormous. Even if you look at the first round results. So if you look at the first round results, you basically had twenty percent or eighty five percent split between the top four candidates and then there were a couple second tier candidates who got about five percent or so and then some marginal candidates. The four candidates that made between the one between 20 and 25 percent of the vote, one was Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who is a pretty far left candidate who argued for massively massive hiring in the public sector, raising the minimum wage, renegotiating European treaties to make Europe basically a social welfare union as opposed to a common market. So this would be a populist from the left? From the left. In a lot of ways, he's the most entertaining theatrical candidate. I really like him, his style personally. He's got some drawbacks in that he's got a soft spot for Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro and some of the less attractive models on the left in terms of their authoritarian practice. Why the low voter turnout? Because people didn't get the candidate they wanted? Yeah, definitely. So absolutely. So you have him on the left, you have 21% who went to Marine Le Pen on the right. So already you have 40% of the first round voters who were expressing an extreme dissatisfaction with the status quo, not just around the margins or they want some change or some reform, but an extreme dissatisfaction. Apparently, quite a bit of the Mélenchon voters stayed home, not as enormous as they expected, but quite a bit did. And Marine Le Pen won out actually, she won over some of the conservative right candidate, François Fillon, who lost in the first round also. So there was definitely a sense that in 2002, when her father made it to the second round, there was an enormous outpouring of voter engagement. Socialist voters, I have friends whose family are longtime socialist and communist voters. There's still a French Communist Party here that runs candidates who literally cried voting for Jacques Chirac, who was a conservative right politician against Jean-Marie Le Pen. But they went and they did what they considered to be their duty as in terms of Republican ideals, Republican meaning of Republic, not the Republican Party. This time that didn't exist where people weren't willing to, they didn't want to hold their nose and vote for the lesser. Exactly. There was just this sense, this sense that, you know, we've given enough over the years, no one's listening to us and we're not going to do it again, kind of similar to some of the very dedicated Bernie Sanders voters who refuse to vote for Hillary Clinton, I suspect. At the same time, the polling leading into the second round showed Macron ahead something like 60 to 40 percent and the French polling was pretty accurate. So I think there was a sense that... Is there a Brexit movement in there? I mean, was Marine Le Pen for... She's in the European Parliament, would she be against the EU? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. That was the central part of her platform was pulling out of the EU and the Euro and it cost her significantly. She's a member of the European Parliament, partly to be obstructionist, partly because that was where the FN did the best because I believe the European Parliament is a proportional representation from the national elections. I'd have to check on that. But that's why they didn't get boxed out in a second round. But for instance, she's been accused of using EU parliamentary funds to hire people as parliamentary assistants for the European Parliament and then dedicating them to basically national front campaign duties. So she's being basically investigated for embezzling EU funds for her own national campaign. What I like about the national front is at least we know where they are. We kind of know they're in the Republican Party here in America, but I kind of like the idea of one party of racist Holocaust deniers. What I didn't know about... Well, at least you can... They are what they are. The national... So you don't have to... Also, increasingly, because she's tried to normalize the party, it's gotten a little cloudier. So there have been, for instance, she stepped down as party president after the first round symbolically to show that she's rising above party politics. And the person who took her place, within days, it was revealed that they'd given an interview 10 years ago denying that the gas chambers existed, for instance. That's what I wanted to ask you about the national front. Up until recently, I didn't know this and I'm not sure it's true. The Vichy government, when the Nazis invaded France, they had a puppet regime, the Vichy government, and there were collaborators. And it was roughly about four years of French politicians doing the Nazis business in France. I always assumed there was shame associated with that. And people would be busy denying their involvement with the Nazis. But from what I've been reading, Le Pen and the National Front kind of coalesced. These were all people who were collaborators during World War II. Is that a fair statement that the National Front has its roots in the Vichy government? No, I don't think so. I mean, generationally, it's not the same generation. Her father founded the party. I mean, maybe in terms of legacy and inheritance from a previous generation of French sort of extreme right collaborationists, that yes. But in terms of the party itself growing out of that or being formed by people like that, no, I wouldn't say that. It's very complicated because you have, definitely you have instant, I mean, there were collaborationists in France. And, you know, nowadays everyone was in, everyone was in the resistance, right? But at the time, whether that was actually the case or not, who knows. But they say they all were. It's complicated. I don't think anyone actually celebrates the Nazi occupation. And I don't think you could celebrate the Nazi occupation and actually succeed as a party. But there's all sorts of dog whistle stuff about antisemitism, revisionism and Holocaust denial. And then obviously there's always that complicated aspect of sort of fetishizing the oppressor, right? So there was the Nazi occupier and French who wanted to be like as strong as the Nazis or as strong as the occupying force. So in that case, you know, it's hard to decipher or hard to really thread out where one ends and the other begins. I mean, what we can say is that for sure, even recently, there was a part of one of the functionaries of the party down south who had a bookstore. And in his bookstore, he was filmed. There's a secret back room with all these Holocaust denial books, which it's actually illegal to sell here in France. And he was giving a tour to the initiated of the secret chamber of his bookstore, you know. And so he was forced to resign. The party is just, you know, riddled with people like that because that's who it appealed to in the early days. And that's who the father never really renounced appealing to. And, you know, that even even if you don't go as far as collaboration is, there's been a neo-Nazi movement in Europe since the, you know, since the 70s and the 80s. And so the part of it, part of the skinhead movement had a neo-Nazi element to it. And some of the younger far right student groups had a neo-Nazi element to it, to them. So whether or not they actually celebrate the occupation or our collaborationists, there's a sort of fetishizing of that historically. For another show, I would love to talk about the collaborators and how they were treated after the war and whether or not they have reunions and defend themselves and what happened to Patan, Marshall Patan. And there's a great documentary on that. I forget the title. It has chagrin in the title. I can email it to you afterward if you'd like to mention. It's not the sara on the pity, is it? Exactly. That's it. So there was actually a lot of women who had relationships with Nazi soldiers, had their hair shaved off and were publicly humiliated in village squares and town squares and lots of extrajudicial killings, shall we say, after the war. Some of it's hard to determine whether it was just scores being settled, but a lot of it was collaborators. Well, I wrote a book defending the collaborators. It wasn't about the Nazis. It was about states' rights. That's why that's a joke. I'm comparing it was about states' rights. I don't know. It might be too soon. I know. I know. But there isn't the kind of denial in France, the way we have here in America when it comes to slavery. Every block you walk down, you can see bullet holes and plaques that say, on this site, 40 Jews were rounded up by a French. On another level, I hear what you're saying, but the French are masters of what's called here, the non-die, the unsaid. There's a lot that hasn't been addressed. Just to give you an example, during the campaign, Marine Le Pen created a controversy by saying that when the French Vichy forces, police officers rounded up Jews for the Germans, for the Nazis, and deported them, that it wasn't France that was responsible. Jacques Chirac, when he was president, took the unprecedented step of apologizing and accepting responsibility on behalf of the French state, even though at that time it was Vichy. Marine Le Pen went back on that and said, no, that wasn't France, it was Vichy. France at the time was Jacques de Gaulle, who was in London, and France is not responsible, Vichy was. There's still a lot of historical stuff that hasn't been addressed, and that's just World War II. If you get into the Algerian war, it's even more, and that drives a lot of support for the National Front. A lot of their supporters are either first generation or second generation French Algerians who came back from Algeria after the war in Algeria and who have a huge bitterness still to this day against the French state and against de Gaulle for having pulled out of the war and allowing Algeria to become independent. Jean Marine Le Pen, the father, was a soldier in that war. He's actually endorsed the torture that was committed by the French forces in the war. All of that stuff in terms of the historical aspects, it's all there. A lot of it isn't really addressed or mentioned, but very fascinating stuff. There are speech codes in France. There are certain things you're not allowed to say. You'll be prosecuted. I think the first time you invited me to talk on the show, it had to do with that. I was just going to talk about that. I have two questions about that. One is, can a politician be brought up on speech code violations? I would think Le Pen is saying things. I mean, as you pointed out, the person who replaced her to head the party had been a Holocaust denier. Can you run for office and violate the speech codes? No. In other words, it's not protected speech just because you're a politician campaigning. For instance, her father Jean Marine Le Pen was convicted on a couple of occasions for violating speech codes when it came to the Holocaust. I believe maybe a racist remark or two. But for instance, at one point, in talking about World War II, he called the gas chamber as a detail of history, and that the main story was World War II, and the gas chambers were a detail. I believe he was convicted on that of apology for the Holocaust, is the term. Are you fined or what happens? You don't go to jail. I'm not sure. I'd have to check on that. I don't think so, but it depends. I think if you called for violence based on racial characteristics, for instance, that could be jail time. A candidate running for president in France, if he stirs up the populace... Could not question, for instance, the existence of the gas chambers. And suppose they said something about the Arab population, like their... Anything that could be considered targeting someone for their... Well, first of all, race isn't really accepted in France as a category. It's not acknowledged. But I mean, for instance, anyone who said, for instance, when Donald Trump said that Muslims should be banned from entering during the campaign, that would not be protected speech here, I don't believe. Again, I'm not a lawyer, so I hesitate to be 100% certain on this stuff. But certainly, disparaging someone because of their racial characteristics, even as a politician on the stump, would not be protected speech. But you'd still be allowed to run. You'd be fined. But you could probably still get elected president in France saying... I don't know. I mean, you can be excluded from seeking public office. For instance, if you've been convicted of corruption, you can be excluded from public office from one to 10 years, maybe more. So hate speech is not protected in France. And is there a anti-PC movement going on in France? Are there people saying this is mind control and language control and it's Orwellian? No, not really. That's pretty much accepted. That's been litigated already. France isn't the only country, right? I mean, Germany, Mein Kampf was just published last year, I think, for the first time or the year before. And even that was controversial. You can't give the Hitler salute, for instance, in Germany. It's illegal. You and I first connected because you had written a piece for Politico about Charlie Hebdo. About, I think it was two years ago, the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo was shot up by extremists who were upset that Charlie Hebdo was making fun of Muhammad and Allah and did all these cartoons. And you had written a piece in Politico that I loved because it echoed what I believed, which is, yes, there is the issue of freedom of speech, but there's also why are you doing that? Why is the satirical magazine choosing to punch down and pick on the Muslim community and incite them? Not that anybody deserves to be shot up, but you did, you took a chance by calling into question the wisdom of a satirical magazine trying to upset the oppressed. I'd have to go through the piece again. I think the point, I'm not sure I would say that the point I was trying to make is that the people who were defending that, first of all, I was trying to make the point that freedom of speech means something very different in America than it does in France. But also I think I was trying to point out the irony to me that a lot of that, for instance, I mean, Charlie Hebdo, their humor is extremely caustic. And it's caustic towards certain things in particular religion. And they don't respect any of the code. So for instance, of sort of political correctness in the US. So for instance, their cartoons about their cartoons that are trying to show that the National Front is racist use very racially charged images of black people, for instance. So in a way, I think any publication that played with that, you're a comedian, right? There's a third rail and you know it pretty much when you step on it. And it can be really, really funny if you play with it right. But once you step on the third rail, you're just dead. And there's no humor in it. And I think that in some ways, Charlie Hebdo, I don't think they would be considered too funny in the US. And they would probably be attacked and condemned for how close they come to the third rail of trying to attack racism, but at the same time using certain imagery that that are born out of racist stereotypes and things like that. I don't think they're racist by any means. They're like really hardcore atheist communists. But at the same time, they were completely... They had no respect for any codes of correctness. They were willing to offend everyone and anyone. So I think that there aren't too many people in the US who've embraced that fully, the free speech code of go ahead and you have the right to offend everyone. Is France racist in that your French first and everything else is tertiary? So do they... Like when you fill out an application, you don't identify your race for anything, right? No, it's actually... It's not legal if you're polling, for instance, to ask someone's race. You can't actually do... Like sociologists have trouble here doing research on religion and race because you're not allowed to ask that question. So for instance, they get around it by saying... There's no real census, for instance, of how many Muslims there are in France. So it's all sort of extrapolated from how many people are from North African descent and from Muslim majority, Sub-Saharan Africa, things like that. There's no real... There's no statistical count because it's illegal to do so. I don't know if I would say that that's a race, that's... I think that's fascinating and it's a form of racism in that it's saying we don't respect anybody's race, you're French. That's your race. I mean, it's racist in the sense that being colorblind can be accused of being racist. It's sort of enforced colorblindness. Yeah. And at the same time, it's a response... It's an attempt to create national cohesion in an increasingly diverse country. It's the complete opposite of America. It's fascinating. Would a comedian get away with doing the kind of jokes that they do here in the United States where ethnic humor and religious humor and... Yeah, you can. I mean, there's definitely... There's young comedians of, especially of ethnic minority background who get away with it. But I know that there was one who has been... Some hate... He got accused of some speech code violation. I can't... Oh, that's Joe Doné, who's in another category. He's sort of flirted. He started out as like an anti-racist comedian. He was in a duo with, I think, a French-North African Jewish guy, Elie Simone. And Joe Doné, I think, is from the French Antilles. Although I could be wrong. He might be from... His family background might be through Africa. I'm not sure on that. And then over the years, he just started becoming more and more sort of... He's kept getting closer and closer to that third rail, especially when it came to anti-Semitic jokes and Holocaust jokes and things like that. And at a certain point, it was people scratching their heads because some of these far-right extreme neo-Nazi groups were championing his show. And again, it's a complicated question. I kind of go for the Nat Hentoff School of Thought, which is the answer to bad speech is better speech. But France is a different culture. Well, hang on. That's my... Hang on. You said it's a different culture. Yeah, they have a different culture of free speech here. In the same way that they have a different culture, for instance, of what it means, what religious freedom means and tolerance and separation of church and state. You can't wear a head... You can't wear either... You can't wear a yarmulke or a head veil or a very... What's the word I'm looking for? Very visible cross to school if you're in the public school here. Post... Is that a post-World War II phenomenon or...? No, that dates back to the mid-2000s, 2007, I think it was, or 2005. The anti-religion. And again, it's sort of dog whistle because generally it targets young Muslim women who were beginning... There was a sort of a trend towards more religious observance among sometimes not even immigrant children. It was sometimes second and third generation French children of immigrant backgrounds. But at any rate, there are differences. Even there, for Americans, it's separation of church and state, which means you protect the church from the state. In France, it's a totally different religious history, where the Catholic Church was actually a rival and threat to the state. So in other words, in America, it's freedom of religion. In France, it's freedom from religion. So the state was there to guarantee that the church did not exercise power in the public sphere. And part of that means that... Pre-World War II, right? That goes back... Oh, yeah. That's well before World War II. That's the French laws from the turn of the century. And it dates back to the French Revolution. And even the... France had the papacy in French territory at one point. So European history in terms of the struggle between national secular powers and the Catholic Church goes back a long way. And so it's a totally different history. It's hard to explain that. But when you've lived... I mean, I won't say you. I've lived here now for 16 years. And it's almost like part of being bilingual is that when I'm here, I understand it one way. And when I'm in America, I understand it another way. And it's not that I say one is better, one's worse, or that I agree with either. It's just that I understand things differently. It's different sensibility. It's a different mindset and a different culture. Before you go, I want to ask you about Francois Hollande. But I want to just ask you very quickly about freedom of speech, because once a week I have... You don't want to talk about the election at all? Well, I thought you'd be really... Well, I have some questions. But I want to ask you about... I have Professor Corey Bretschneider on the show once a week. And we do a course in constitutional law. And I'm always defending censorship as the devil's advocate. And I say that, to me, language is kind of like zoning in your neighborhood. I don't want a strip joint in my neighborhood. And I have a right as a citizen to block a strip joint in an adult bookstore from being around the corner from my kid's school. I have every right to say, I don't like that. You can have it, just don't have it around me. And I think, to some degree, the same applies to speech, that people have a right to say, I don't want to hear that. It's inappropriate. Knock it off. Go say that someplace else. And then everybody says it's a slippery slope. I say... Well, who's the people who are saying that? Are they government officials? Or are they just your neighbors who are saying, don't come to the block party if you're going to talk like that? I mean, there's a difference, right? There is this knee-jerk First Amendment conversation that I find disturbing in that I have certain friends who say, speech should not be monitored. Nobody should question speech. Everybody should be free to say whatever they want. And I say, if everybody's free to say whatever they want, then I'm saying, shut up. Shut up. And I'm not going to... I mean, First Amendment only applies to government. It doesn't apply even to private sector. I mean, you look at social media, Twitter, Facebook, they can censor anything they want. They're not government. And in fact, they're expected to now, for instance, censor, whether it's terrorists that use social media or racists or people who are advocating violence. So in terms of that, I think that you have to make the distinction between who's doing the censorship. But I mean, one thing I'd just say, in general, I remember the last time we spoke, we were talking about the American election, I think. And you said something that I didn't call you on, but I never forgot it because you said, no, I believe, you were talking about having faith in people and in talking with people because you said you could convince them. If you could talk with someone, you could convince them that you're right. But to me, having faith in people is sort of like, what if they're right? And the same thing with censorship, it's like, who's the one who's deciding who gets censored? Is am I censoring you or are you censoring me? I don't particularly like censorship, but I'm sure I find it a lot easier to deal with me censoring you than you censoring me. So I think that in general, when we look around and say who's talking, who's saying what, and who gets to say not to be quiet, it's similar to that respect that we have for each other democratically. We need to sort of put ourselves in the other person's position and say, well, maybe I wouldn't be too comfortable if someone were telling me what I could and couldn't say. So let me just not tell other people what they can and can't say. At the same time, I think you're well within your rights and I agree. Someone's just saying things that you don't like or you don't agree with or that make you uncomfortable, you have every right to not listen to them and not offer them a platform, certainly on your show, for instance. So the question I had was, in France, it's different. They do guide, they guide speech, they monitor speech, they listen to what people say. As I say, they have zoning. It seems to me that they have a more rational political discourse in France, that they are better read, better informed. They understand nuance and subtlety, more so than they do in the United States. It's a broad generalization. I mean... Wouldn't you say the French electorate is better informed than the American electorate? I'd say less and less so over the years. But overall. Yeah, probably. So by guiding... I mean, not being at all qualified to make a judgment one way or the other, my instinct would say yes, yeah. So there is some virtue to wise men and women saying, watch your language, mind your peas and cues. Again, you have to look back at the different... There's a different... It makes for better discourse. There's a different history here too, David. You have to look back at that and put it into the context. Here, Europe is three generations removed from World War II and from the Nazi ideology, where it wasn't abstract and it wasn't speech. So the things that are forbidden are things that had very real consequences here on this continent. Obviously for the United States too, in terms of American soldiers that fought here and and slaves and slaves. But I think, for instance, that I don't know that the American experience was as marked by that kind of speech and ideology. But perhaps I'm mistaken. Well, you're talking about America. What about... Hang on for a second, because I want to ask you about Olaan. We've learned the consequences of hate speech, the Civil War. We know what language does. That was more than speech. But I guess I'm trying to think through how I would feel if I were a Black American and someone was saying, maybe we should outlaw white supremacist discourse. Well, I... That because it had as... Even though it was 100 years ago or more than 100... More than 150 or it was 150 years ago as opposed to 60 years ago, it had just as much human cost. So there's no reason why it shouldn't be the same thing. In France, it's consistent in that its racist speech is outlawed as well as anti-Semitic speech. So there's no inconsistency there. I think the American culture of free speech is just completely different. Yeah. Well, I think the French are better educated. And because they're watching what people say and they listen to what people say. So very quickly before we wrap it up, Francois Olaan was a socialist. He did six years as president right after the economic collapse. The French decided, unlike the United States, to elect a socialist. They said, that's it, we can't trust the big banks. We were screwed. We're putting a socialist in office. And I liked Olaan. I thought, but everything worked against him, didn't it? He tried to maintain the safety net. He couldn't. And then he kind of turned his back on the safety net, right? Well, Olaan, I mean, to begin with the socialist party is no longer socialist in terms of like socialism. I mean, they're not talking about nationalizing industry, for instance. Olaan, the problem Olaan had was that he campaigned on a pretty militant left program of his enemy being international finance and how he was going to break Europe, EU austerity and things like that. And then basically he ran on a social democratic tick or he governed as a social democrat. Mac home was actually his principal economic advisor and was his minister of the economy for a couple years. And basically what he tried to do was, I don't think he would have been too supportive of it, to be honest, from what I know about your politics. He used tax credit incentives to try to get big businesses to hire. He had a sort of almost like an informal non-binding pact of responsibility to get big businesses to hire and to get big tax credits in exchange, but they didn't actually end up hiring. Mac home as the economy minister tried to lighten some of the regulations on the businesses and on the labor market that are extremely unpopular here. I mean, the thing is, and I know what we'd probably disagree on the fundamentals of this politically, but France has basically resisted sort of third way new left structural reforms over the last 20 years. There just hasn't, it's been at the margins, but France, while Great Britain and the US and then later Germany were creating more flexibility in terms of hiring and firing and trying to create economies that had more opportunity and more oxygen rather than social safety networks. For better and worse, I'm not going to argue that that was all good. France was actually reduced the legal working week to 35 hours per week. It did moderate, raised the retirement age at the margins, but not as much as other countries and still has very, very onerous restrictions in terms of how permanent employees can be fired and what kind of severance packages they get at the end of that. What it does is that it creates, there's certainly a better social safety net. At the same time, it creates these disincentives for hiring. You've had a younger generation that instead of having the very prized permanent job contract, which creates the greatest security and the safety, they have the string of temporary contracts on which they can't rent apartments because it's not, it's too precarious for landlords. They can't get loans to buy property, to buy an apartment or a house or a car because banks don't trust that they'll be employed. It's created this sort of second class job citizenship where you have an older generation that has permanent jobs and a younger generation that has temporary contracts. The businesses are afraid to hire because the business cycle is cyclic. That's why it's called the business cycle. When things go down for a small company that is particularly vulnerable to the business cycle, they can't just lay people off like they can in the US, now for better and worse, again. What it does is it builds in a high structural unemployment here. The unemployment rate in France has been between 7-9% pretty much uniformly for the last 20 years. 7-9% unemployment. Yeah, it's built in. That's cooked into the recipe. You have a high safety net. All of these people get free healthcare, but again, it condemns youth unemployment I think is at 25%. It condemns people to really long-term unemployment in a way that is very, very destructive in terms of people's lives. We know what the impact that that has. What Oran tried to do and what Macron is promising to do is to provide a little more flexibility for employers to increase training for workers get into fields that are growth fields as opposed to legacy fields and to invest in green energy, to invest in some of the innovative stuff, high tech, things like that. I mean, France has enormous human capital in terms of its education system, in terms of its high degree of technological innovation, things like that. France has all the strong cards to play in the global economy of today. What Macron is trying to do is try to say, look, we need to be a little more audacious, a little less risk averse. That's a very hard sell here because people here, whereas an American thinks of opportunity, French people think of precariousness. They don't like an American person when they start a business. Generally, if you have a friend or he or she says, I've got all this experience, now I'm going to start my own business and go out on my own. Generally in the States, we're like, oh, right on. Good luck. I really hope it works well for you. Here in France, if you say to someone, yeah, I'm going out on my own, I'm starting my own business, they're going to be like, are you sure? It's kind of dangerous. There's a real risk averseness here when it comes to that kind of risk taking. And Macron is trying to reconcile, is trying to say, look, he talked a lot about conquering France. He's trying to say, look, we can do it. But it's a hard sell here. People really don't like that kind of exposure. Judah Grenstein is the editor-in-chief of World Politics Review. Trend lines every Friday. Who's your guest? The guest this Friday should be Richard Bitzinger. He wrote a great article for us that will be publishing tomorrow on China's expanding global security role and presence. Great. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. It's been my pleasure. As always, David, thanks for having me. Great. Thank you, Judah.