Hello, my name is David Ronsman and this is Talking Politics. Today we're revisiting an interview that we recorded with the French economist Tom

Piketty in May 2017, the week that Emmanuel Macron won the French presidential election. And we're going to be thinking about what we've learnt since about

Macron, about France, and about democracy. Talking politics is brought to you in partnership with the London Review of Books, Europe's leading magazine of books and ideas, where you can read elegant and expansive essays on every subject imaginable. From Amir Stnovassan on pronouns to James Meek on the WHO, from Pancage Mischra on Anglo-America to Catherine Rundell on the Greenland Journal.

We've learnt shock. Get 12 issues in print and online, that's half a year of the LRB for just £12, with the URL lrb.me-talk.

We've been revisiting a few interviews that we recorded at Momentous Points with interesting people over the last few years, Judith Butler on Donald Trump, Yuval Harari on robots.

We spoke to Tom Piketty, who's the author of among many other things, Capital in the 21st century, probably the most influential work of economics, political economy, just writing about politics over the last two decades.

We spoke to him just before the second round of the 2017 presidential election, so many on Macron and Marine Le Pen were facing off, having come through the first round, and in the first round the candidates of the main parties, the centre left and centre right parties, had been defeated.

French politics was in a state of turmoil, and that's reflected a bit in our conversation, we're trying to understand what's going on. Tom Piketty is trying to make sense of it, and he was involved in that campaign, he had advised Amal, the candidate of the socialists who had done terribly in the first round, 6% of the vote.

So it's partly a conversation about the churn in democratic politics, the new divisions, the new ways in which voters were lining up behind these candidates.

We knew when we spoke that Macron was going to win, he won slightly more easily than Tom Piketty thought, it was 66, 34, rather than 60, 40, but still, Marine Le Pen did get a third of the vote.

So we reflected a bit on that, but also as you'll hear, we talked more widely about what's going on with democracy and how it relates to the central theme of Piketty's great book, the question of inequality, whether democratic societies can deal with inequality, and if so, how.

And that then touches on the question of Europe, which is another issue around which Tom Piketty has been very involved as a public intellectual, as an advisor, he's a passionate pro-European, he believes in a more integrated Europe.

So we wanted to play this conversation because it's interesting, and I think it's always interesting to hear these very interesting people reflecting at a moment of political flux, trying to understand what's going on and now looking back.

So after this hell and an eye are going to reflect on what we think we've learnt since about Macron and about some of the themes that Tom Piketty addresses here.

We're speaking the morning after the French presidential debate between Macron and Le Pen, that Macron was thought to have won, but then Harry Clinton was thought to have won her debate with Donald Trump.

Let's not go there, but we're speaking obviously before the vote this weekend, we have some idea of what might happen, but we don't know for certain.

But Tom, if we could go back to the first round, the most striking thing was that the two main parties, the mainstream parties, were not able either of them to get a candidate through to the second round.

So broadly, what is driving that, and that's a phenomenon we see in different parts of the democratic world, will come onto the particular problem for social democracy in a second.

But what do you think is the primary driver of this inability for the mainstream parties to command the vote they used to command?

Well, there are long run evolution in the structure of the electorate of left-wing parties, there are long run evolution and the challenges that they face, and there are also more shorter run problems.

So in the particular case of France and the Eurozone more generally, in the past 10 years, the parties in power, and so in particular the socialist party in the past five years and the right-wing party,

Sarcosis, the five years before, have done a terrible job with the financial crisis.

...