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

Today we will talk about the French elections. Jack, can you take us through what happened on Sunday?

Yeah, so what happened on Sunday, I mean, it was a big surprise for, I think, most of us, including the pollsters.

Although the Ré Sommlé Nacional, so that's the party

Marine Le Pen leads, finished in first with the vote share on Sunday's second round of French

elections, with 37% of the vote. Tactical voting against the Rézomlement Nacional worked very

effectively to put them into third place in terms of the seat count. So the left,

which, you know, they run as an alliance, the Nouveau-Pompelier, won 180 seats. The centrists,

Emmanuel Macron's faction, Ensemble, they won 159 seats and then Rézombolein Nacional came in third

with 142. That was the result of basically number one, strategic

choices that the left and center parties made in the lead up to the second round of the vote.

And number two, their voters actually going along with it. What happened in the first round of

the election was that turnout was extremely high compared to a normal legislative election.

For instance, in 2022, the turnout

for the French legislative election was about 47%. Last week, it was about 67%, 20 points up.

Now, what that turnout did was that meant that there were a larger number of three-way runoff

contests ahead of the second round. So for any of the uninitiated,

France's elections work in a two-round system

where the first round determines who goes

to a runoff round a week later.

There were a number of three-way runoff contests

heading into this week because of the high turnout

...