Welcome to the Euro Intelligence Podcast. I'm Wolfgang Munchau and with me are Zuzana Monsheng and Jack Smith.

Today we would like to talk about populists, European populists, how they differ, what they have in common, and how and especially how not to deal with them if you're coming from the political center.

Let's start with the news we had in the briefing this morning.

Susanne, you wrote about the return of Marion Marischel in France. Tell us about this.

Yes. So Marion Marischel has been out of politics for quite a while. She is the niece of Marine Le Pen. She was part of the party. And then she decided to quit politics to found her own finishing school and define a new curriculum for right-wing politics.

Finishing school for populists.

For populists, for a rival, yes.

She was quite successful.

The program was so successful that last year they actually opened up another branch in Paris.

So this one is in Lyon and actually they opened up another branch in Paris.

But when during the presidential elections, when Marine Dupin was the only candidate on the far right, the last one in 2022,

all of a sudden came Eric Z Zenmore, which was a commentator

for a long-time commentator and populist, already very known through the press through his own

writings. He had a very gifted campaigner who just brought him out of nowhere and pushed him

into arenas full of people,

who all of a sudden were cheering this very different form of far right,

that it was very different from Marine-Nepen, more early,

more socialist version of far-right populism.

Here comes Eric Zemore, the witty, intellectual,

kind of appealing nationalist,

who was talking about

the nostalgia, about the good old life

...