Welcome to the Euro Intelligence Podcast.

I'm Wolfgang Munchau and with me are Zezanne, Munchang and Jack Smith.

Today we will talk about France, or rather they will talk about France,

because they are the experts here at Eurointelligence about France.

So I will take myself out and hand over to Zazana.

The subject is French politics.

What happened in the last week and what's likely to happen beyond. And my colleagues will disentangle this for you.

It's easy to lose sight what happens in France. And I think part of it is because of the political

system, which is quite unusual and different

from what we know in Europe, the role of the president and the role of the prime minister.

Usually in the rest of Europe, the president is more of a ceremonial figure, but in France,

he's the one who's defining foreign policy. He's the one who's calling

the shot about the next government and also what's happening in times of crisis. And what we've

seen is that after some tumultuous events over the weekend, Sebastian Le Cournue, he was appointed

just the week before as Prime Minister after Francois Beirou failed in the confidence vote.

He was supposed to be the next Prime Minister to get the budget running.

He had consultations with all sides and concluded based on the information he got that there is no passage of

compromise possible with the positions that the parties presented him with.

That him to conclude that his mission is a mission impossible basically and he handed in his

resignation.

Imano and Marcon the president accepted, just to give him another mandate to

prepare or mediate between the parties for another two days to see if there is not something

...