Hello and welcome to the CER podcast on Path in Europe. I'm your host, Octavia Hughes.

Two weeks ago, we brought you an episode in the run-up to the European elections.

And today, my guests are joining me again to discuss the fallout from the results.

Welcome back to the podcast, Christina Luigi and Jaka.

So headlines have been dominated by the strong performance of right-wing and far-right parties in many member states, particularly in France,

where the far-right resemblance national received twice as many votes as President Macron's party,

leading him to call a snap election which could pave the way for 28-year-old Jordan Bardella

to become France's next prime minister, and in Germany, where the alternative

for Deutschland came ahead of Chancellor Schultz's Social Democrats. But despite this, this wasn't

the far-right surge many expected, and the centrist European People's Party remained the largest

in the Parliament. So what does all this mean for the next five years?

So I'll start with a question for all of you. Were you surprised by these results? And is there

anything in them that we should be paying more attention to? Thank you, Octavia. I think the most

interesting story, obviously, is the story of the far right. That was the story that was most

reported before the election. And I think the fact that it was

so well-reported, obscured certain trends and did not really allow us to fully appreciate what

happened. I think the result can be interpreted in two ways. On the one hand, the far-right did

increase its vote share, according to certain calculations, from 18% to as much as 24% in the

parliament, which is definitely a rise. At the same time, as many are saying the center held,

and the reason people are saying that is because the far-right is still fragmented. So the

DCR, which is more considered the hard-right party grouping and the ID, which is more on the far-right

end of the spectrum, they increase their vote share only by around one or two percentage points

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