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

Today we will talk about France. After the European elections on Sunday, Emmanuel Macron announced the dissolution of Parliament as his party performed poorly and as Marine Le Pen's party gained over 30% of the votes.

It was a daring bet, possibly a foolish one.

We will discuss this whether it was.

We're recording this conversation on Wednesday.

Yesterday was Tuesday, the markets briefly panicked.

There was a spike in French bond yields amid rumors that turned out to be wrong

that Macron would leave if he were to lose the elections. Susanna, where are we now in this

situation? Was this a big miscalculation? Was it a daring thing? And how do you see the politics

unfolding now? We can certainly say it was a daring move

from Emmanuel Macron who before always said no way he would dissolve or he would actually

give in into the calls from the Rassamblement National to dissolve Parliament if he were to lose

these elections. Now coming after the elections actually hours after the results have been announced,

coming out and actually doing exactly that was a daring move.

The calculation behind was that rather than being compromised and linger on in the assembly,

not being able to find any majority in the assembly,

to put everything right in front of the voters and saying, look, this is your choice.

You might have chosen to do a protest what's going to be the next time when it really counts in the French Assembly.

First polls suggest that the Rassemblement National would also win the legislative elections, but not as much as to give them an outright majority.

And also, it's early days on the heat of the victory in the European elections.

We have two and a half weeks till to go, which is not a lot, for things to change and shift.

And we know in politics, things can shift quite quickly.

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