Will France’s election gamble pay off for Macron - or backfire?
The Take
Al Jazeera
4.7 • 748 Ratings
🗓️ 25 June 2024
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Following a European Union election victory for France’s far right, French President Emmanuel Macron decided to dissolve parliament. Now, France is facing a snap election, and voting begins June 30th. With the far-right National Rally projected to win, what will the future of France look like?
In this episode:
- Tristan Redman (@TristanAJE), Al Jazeera Senior Producer and host of the award-winning investigative podcast ”Ghost Story”
Episode credits:
This episode was produced by David Enders, and Duha Mosaad, with Amy Walters, Chloe K. Li, Mohammed Zain Shafi Khan, Manahil Naveed and our host, Natasha Del Toro, in for Malika Bilal.
Our sound designer is Alex Roldan. Our lead of audience development and engagement is Aya Elmileik. Munera Al Dosari and Adam Abou-Gad are our engagement producers.
Alexandra Locke is The Take’s executive producer, and Ney Alvarez is Al Jazeera's head of audio.
Connect with us:
@AJEPodcasts on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Threads and YouTube
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Al Jazeera Podcasts. |
| 0:07.0 | Today, the results of this month's European Union elections have sparked a reckoning in France. |
| 0:18.0 | I've never seen French society as polarized as it is now. Will Emmanuel Macron's |
| 0:25.1 | election gamble pay off? I'm Natasha del Toro, and this is the take. So my name is Tristan Redmond. |
| 0:40.7 | I'm speaking to you from Paris, and I am the senior producer in the Paris Bureau for Al-Dazera English, and I cover French news mostly. |
| 0:50.2 | Wonderful. |
| 0:51.3 | And we're going to talk about Paris today. |
| 0:52.8 | But before that, let's start with the European Union elections that happened earlier this month. |
| 0:59.3 | The European Parliament is the EU's only governing body directly chosen by voters. This past weekend, those voters pulled that body more to the right than it has ever been. |
| 1:10.8 | So Tristan, Europeans vote for the representatives in the EU, |
| 1:14.4 | and French voters came out this time for the far right, |
| 1:17.7 | which was a pretty big surprise, right? |
| 1:20.1 | Sure. |
| 1:21.4 | Maybe walk us through what happened. |
| 1:25.7 | Big surprise, yes and no. I think everyone was kind of expecting something of a swing to the far right, but maybe just not quite this much. |
| 1:36.7 | So what happened was, so you have this European body, right? It's the European Parliament. MEPs, members of the European Parliament, sit in Strasbourg |
| 1:45.9 | and in Brussels and they make European laws. And every five years there's an election and people |
| 1:52.7 | pay little or no attention to it sometimes because it's, you know, MEPs do not have a kind of daily |
| 1:58.9 | impact on people's lives. |
| 2:03.6 | But it has been getting more important over recent years, |
| 2:08.1 | mostly because the far right has become a stronger and stronger force within the European Parliament. |
| 2:11.7 | And what happened was in France, the far right did very well, |
... |
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