Welcome to the Euro Intelligence Podcast. I'm Wolfgang Munchau and with me, Azizanne Muncheng and Jack Smith.

Today we are asking the question, does the center hold in European politics? We have problems in France with the center, problems in Germany.

Christian Lindner is acting in, shall we say, a rather extreme way to push through what he perceives to be centrist positions.

We see Emmanuel Macron in some difficulty in France.

Zezana, you've written about this. What is your perspective?

France is a special case in the sense that we have a total public outrage about the pension

reform. What was actually a reasonable reform, retirement was to be lifted by two years, 264.

The number of years that were required to get the full pension was to be extended. These were the

main elements of his pension reform,

but for weeks and months, France has been battling this particular reform and it got hammered

from the left, it got hammered from the right. So the centre really with this reform that

sounded on paper, sounded very reasonable and very much centrist, sort of like

from a financial point of view, well, we have to do that because otherwise the pension

fund will no longer be sustainable.

All these rational arguments all of a sudden didn't hold anymore.

Even Les Republicans, whom were supposed to back that reform, all of a sudden split in part

and had some of the people in their ranks deciding against that reform.

Now, with all this crisis, it benefited usually the Marine de Pen.

Not so much Jean-Lieu-Milancheon, who was very outspoken against the reform on the left.

No, it was Marine Depenn who shot in the polls and who seemed to be the beneficiary.

We've seen polls showing the support for her and her party rising not only for the usual suspects,

like the workers, but also amongst

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