The the Hello and

welcome to Behind the News. My name is Doug Henwood in these troubled and uncertain times

and note of stability.

Two guests today, Cole Stangler on the Monumentally

and conclusive French elections and David Palumbo Lou on the Stanford University Silicon Valley

Millie that helped produce the ridiculous but scary JD Vance.

On June 9th, the deeply unpopular French President Emmanuel Macron, a former investment banker-turned-politician,

the best thing you can say about him is that he has nice, those surprisingly inexpensive suits,

dissolve the National Assembly and call for elections.

His coalition had lost its majority after the 2022 elections, and his government had been using

the power to enact legislation without parliamentary approval granted it by the French Constitution.

There's much that is odd about the French system as we'll hear, like a president rather than a

prime minister dissolving parliament and the power to rule by decree. The immediate spark for the

snap election was the poor showing his party had in elections for the European

Parliament. In his address calling for elections, McCrone invoked the fear of the far right, meaning the National

Rally Party, led by Jordan Bardella, who was something of a figurehead from Marine Le Pen.

As things turned out, the National Rally did rather rather well as it had in the European

parliamentary elections. As is the case in many countries the elections were held in

two rounds June 30 and July 7th. The point of the second was to clarify

constituencies where no candidate had a majority in the first round.

The coalition of left parties did surprisingly well, though not well enough to form a government,

which led to weeks of unprecedented dickering, with a center more willing to make a deal with the right and the left.

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