Hello, I'm Paige and this is the Euro Intelligence podcast covering current affairs in the EU and Euro area.

I'm joined by Wolfgang and Susanna, directors of Eurointelligence in Oxford.

Guys, the big story this week, again, second round of the French regional elections.

Susanna, you wrote about it this morning.

What has changed and who is doing better or worse at the end of the second round?

Yeah, it got actually worse this second round and confirmed what we saw already last week.

And when the first round already confirmed that the prediction that the Rassemblement National,

the party from Marine Le Pen, would take six regions,

that these were vastly exaggerated.

So the second round, we were still expecting that she would at least take one of the regions, the Packer region, down in the south.

But even that didn't manifest.

And that was sort of this weekend surprise when it comes to the far right.

Now, when he comes to Manuel Macron, there were two things he had hoped to achieve with

these regional elections.

One was that he got a foothold in the regional

government structures. As it turned out, it only got him elected 80 out of 1,000 people

in terms of regional government structures and even more so when it comes to municipal ones.

But so that didn't work out so well.

The other thing that he had hoped for is that he becomes the kingmaker in the second round,

that his party would be the one who decides who's going to be in charge.

And in a sense, you could argue that in this Paca region,

because there are the candidate from the Conservative Party,

...