Welcome to the Eurointelligence podcast. With me, Zuzanne Monshank and Jack Smith.

Now, today this morning, we would like to talk about the French elections and we would like to talk later about China's zero COVID policy and how it affects Western supply chains.

Zane, what do we make of the outcome of the French elections?

It's not entirely unexpected that Macon won that was forecast, but where are we now?

Yes, it's a rerun from the 2017.

So we had the same second round in 2017.

But it was actually quite a tight call for Le Pen because Jean-Lubert-Chain, he got to 22% and just a percentage

point behind Marine Le Pen. So somehow this tactical voting that he called for seemed to have

worked also to mobilize some supporters in his world. But it was not

enough for him to get into the second round. So here we are. We have Emmanuel Macron and Marine

Napan. And it's going to be much tighter in the second round than it was in 2017. That's also what

we know. One thing was in 2017,

Macron was completely unknown to the public. There was no past that he could actually

throw in front of him. So this time, of course, after five years of being a president,

there's a lot of grievances and a lot of things to go against, but also for

Macron. So his balance changes with the voters. Then you have Marine Le Pen, who continued

her de-denominization. And in that sense, she was quite successful. She chose a low profile campaign. Media didn't cover

much of her campaigning until the very last moment, a very couple of weeks before, all of a sudden

people realized that actually she's been touring all these villages and all these small towns

and talking to people. And that actually worked quite well for her. She was all of a

sudden, as one of the members of the L'Replican put it, Macron, he talks to France, but

Marina Penn, she talks to the French. And in that sense, that was the biggest difference.

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