Welcome to the Eurointelligence podcast. I'm Wolfgang Muncho and with me, I'm Zanamunshank and Jack Smith. Today, we will talk about France. After the first round of the French parliamentary election, an extraordinary picture has emerged. The RN came first. That was not the surprising thing, but we now have a situation where tactical voting occurs. We have a huge turnout in the first round, which

led to three-way and four-way races, a very unusual phenomenon in the French parliamentary

voting system. Jack, can you tell us where we are at this point? So firstly, just setting up some

of the context to basically kind of try and explain why we've ended up

where we are is that in the French system, as I'm sure many of our listeners will know, normally

what happens is that there's a first round and a second round. In the first round, that basically

decides who goes to the second round. Sometimes candidates can win outright in the first round

by getting more than 50% of the vote. That is relatively rare. So most, most contests typically

go to a second round. And most of the time, those contests involve two first place candidates

going through. So the first and second place candidates. But there's a bit of a quirk in the system

where if you get

more than 12.5% of registered votes, then you can advance to the second round, regardless of whether

you've finished second or third or even fourth or fifth or whatever. So what this means is that the nature of

second round contests is highly dependent on turnout. Turnout was extremely high for French

legislative election. It was just under 20 percentage point. It was somewhere in the region of 20

percentage points higher than the previous legislative

election, which means that there were a very large number of three-way second-round

contests.

Heading out of Sunday's election, there were 306 three-way second-round contests and

another five four-way second-round contests. This is in a

National Assembly in France with 577 seats. That meant that, you know, going into this,

most of the legislative contests for the second round would have been three-way. Now, because

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