Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm your host, Jason Palmer.

Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

The global total of debt has gone through the roof in recent years, but borrowing costs

have stayed low. Our number of countries look at the enormous bill that borrowers will

suddenly face as interest rates start to rise, a burden that will be unequally shared.

And we examine an outlier in the global marriage statistics, somewhere that despite pandemic

restrictions actually experienced a short rise in weddings.

We've got reason to suspect that that pattern will be broken in April's election. According

to our freshly released election forecast model, President Emmanuel Macron, who's expected

to throw his hat in the ring any day now, is likely to prevail. That outcome, though,

won't be decided in Parisian salons or rural vineyards.

Saint-Briton de Paris, a very average suburb that you find on the fringes of Greater Paris,

it's really the edge of the city where the capital, the sort of built-up capital, bleeds

into the fields. Sophie better is our Paris bureau chief.

If you walk around, which I did, you see curved streets with small houses, each with a

little garage and a parking space, and a one main street with a bellottery in a baker

and a cheesy pizza restaurant and a cafe. And then on the out of town, you have these

big hypermarkets where people have to drive and do their shopping to get back to their

suburban house. Okay, that all sounds pleasant enough and not much like the site of an election

battleground, but why did you decide to go there in and not Paris or even Marseille, beyond

the cheesy pizza? Well, I think that it's a mistake sometimes to think of France as either

being the city centre with the sort of elegant boulevards or rural France, with its, you

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