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 crunchers look at the enormous bill that borrowers will suddenly face as interest rates start to rise,

a burden that'll be unequally shared.

And we examine an outlier in the global marriage statistics,

somewhere that despite pandemic restrictions actually experienced a sharp rise in weddings.

First up, though, French voters haven't re-elected an incumbent president since the victory of Jacques Chirac two decades ago. Restes a veille. Defendon the liberty.

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-Bris-sur-Fouré is a very average sort of 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 sort of curved streets with small houses, each

with a little garage and a parking space, and a one main street with

a belligerie, you know, 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 and not Paris or even Marseille, beyond the cheesy pizza?

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