Hello, my name is David Ronserman and this is Talking Politics. Today I'm joined by Shaheen Valley.

Yeah, I'm pretty proud of myself. And Chris Bickerton.

So I woke up slightly feverish this morning, but because of my deep devotion to the podcast,

I clapped out of bed. And we're talking about France, the forthcoming presidential election,

and the meaning of a Manuel Macron.

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I'm on the ethernet, so I've not even been using my... Sorry, sorry, that's completely my fault.

I'm gonna quit and then seeing that makes it better.

You know, it's okay. Okay, should we give it a one more go? Thanks for your patience, Shaheen.

Sorry about this. Before we start, I should say that we were hoping that Helen Thompson would

join us for this conversation and ironically, as we come to the end of this podcast, the tech

has finally let us down. Helen isn't here this week, as I'll tell you at the end, she will be with us

next week. Shaheen Valley is a senior fellow at the German Council for Foreign Relations. We've

talked him before about France. He worked once upon a time with a manual Macron, and we have

over the years had many conversations with Chris Bickerton about the state of European politics and

France and Italy in particular. Shaheen, we're a couple of months out from the first round of

the presidential election and anything can happen in two months. There's a lot going on in the world,

but as things stand now, do you see any plausible scenario in which a manual Macron does not end up

...