French anti-foreign legion: an EU-election shock

This episode discusses the recent EU parliamentary elections, focusing particularly on the surprising results in France and the broader implications for European politics.

1. President Macron’s party was significantly outperformed by Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, indicating a potential shift towards the right in French politics.
2. Despite the rightward shift in some countries, the overall European Parliament landscape remains fragmented, with the center still holding substantial influence.
3. The results may complicate EU governance, especially in areas like climate policy where consensus is crucial.
4. The episode reflects on the strategic implications for Macron, who faces increased political vulnerability at home.
5. Voter unpredictability and the nuances of EU elections, often seen as a venue for protest votes, are highlighted.

1: Introduction and Overview

Hosts introduce the episode’s focus on EU parliamentary election results and their implications. They discuss the structure of the episode and what to expect in the analysis.

2: Shocking Results in France

Discussion on the unexpected electoral success of the far-right in France and the political repercussions for President Macron’s administration.

3: Broader European Context

Analysis of election outcomes in other European countries, notably Germany, and the overall impact on the EU political landscape.

4: Implications for EU Governance

Exploration of how the election results might affect day-to-day operations and policy making in the European Parliament.

5: Conclusion and Reflections

Hosts summarize the episode’s key points and reflect on the potential future of EU politics post-election.

1. Stay Informed: Regularly update yourself on political developments in your country and the EU to understand how changes may impact you.
2. Engage in Dialogue: Discuss political changes and their implications with peers to gain diverse perspectives.
3. Participate in Elections: Exercise your right to vote in both national and EU elections to have a say in your governance.
4. Educate Others: Share insights from this episode with others to foster a more informed electorate.
5. Support Democratic Processes: Advocate for and support initiatives that uphold democratic values and processes within your community.

Hard-right parties did well in Europe's parliamentary elections—so well in France that President Emmanuel Macron called a risky snap election. Elsewhere, though, the political centre held. We examine the policies that are getting America’s many chronically truant students back in school (9:13). And the delicate business of naming a new car (16:42).

People

Emmanuel Macron, Marine Le Pen, Chris Lockwood, Jason Palmer, Rosie Blore

Companies

None

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Guest Name(s):

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Matt
Hi, this is Matt and Sean from two black guys with good credit from. A local business to a global corporation. Partnering with bank of America gives your operation access to exclusive digital tools, award winning insights, and business solutions so powerful you'll make every move matter. Visit bankofamerica.com banking for business to learn more. What would you like the power to do?

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Jason Palmer
The Economist.

Rosie Blore
Hello and welcome to the intelligence from the Economist. I'm Rosie Blore. And I'm Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

When schools reopened after the pandemic, many children were desperate to get back to in person. Learning others, yeah, not so much now. Some schools in America are trying clever new ways to coax back truants. And pity the marketing departments at automakers. The annals of history include some really bad ideas for branding new models.

Jason Palmer
Our industry editor looks at the sometimes arbitrary, yet always delicate business of naming new cars.

But first, elections for the European Parliament can be extremely telling. As voters in EU countries elect a member of the parliament to represent their constituency in Brussels, they, of course, set a path for the parliament itself. But the exercise is also an intriguing window into national politics, and this years has brought a shock to France. The party of President Emmanuel Macron did so poorly that he opted to call an election at home. Je deside de vous rodonnais le choi de notre parlementaire parle vote.

He said he was dissolving the National assembly, giving back to citizens the choice for our future.

He called it an act of confidence, confidence in the french people to make the fairest choice for themselves and for future generations. That choice may lean, as the EU vote did, toward the hard right national Rally party of Marine Le Pen.

Matt
Who. Claimed, unsurprisingly at this point, to be ready to exercise power to defend the interests of the French. France wasnt the only country that saw a shift to the right. Those shifts reflect politics at home, but also hint at how the business of governing Europe is likely to change. The european parliamentary elections have been going on for several days, but the votes were only counted last night, and they were a bit of a surprise.

Jason Palmer
Chris Lockwood is our Europe editor. Hard right parties did really well in France and Germany. Elsewhere, though, the hard right didn't do quite as well as people had feared, so that overall, we don't see a big shift to the right. But in those two countries, the effects have been pretty shocking. So let's go to France first.

What happened there? Well, this was by far the biggest surprise of the evening. It was expected that Emmanuel Macron's party, which is called renaissance, would do badly. But no one expected it to as badly as it did do. It was absolutely trounced by the hard right party of Marine Le Pen.

Chris Lockwood
That's now called national rally. It used to be front, National Front. They've rebranded themselves but they're still pretty eurosceptic, pretty supportive of Russia. Not a party that we want to see running France for sure. But they came far top in the european parliamentary elections as they did last time five years ago, but this time by a much bigger margin.

They got more than twice as much of the vote as Macron's party. On top of the very strong showing by national rally with 32% of the vote almost, you can add another 5.5% of the votes for reconquest. Reconquet a far right outfit. Definitely not just a hard right outfit. Very anti migrant indeed.

And what that shows you is that close to 40% of french people in the european election voted for pretty radical right wing parties. And that's a shocking result. But why does Mister Macron think its so shocking that he needs to call a general election? Well that is because he doesnt as it stands, have a workable majority in the assembly of nationale, the National assembly. But he can get things done by cobbling together support for individual bills as he did with pension reform.

But he clearly sees now that hes become really quite unpopular and the right is really on the rise. So he sees this moment to join battle with them and im not sure its a good idea. And you mentioned also Germany. What happened there? Well, this was slightly different.

The far right there, the AfD alternative for Germany, they did pretty well, but they didn't win very far from it. The Christian Democrats who are in opposition to the current ruling coalition had a very good night. They did fine. So in that way the narrative of Europe shifting decisively to the far right is a little undermined by that. But it was extremely bad for the ruling coalition led by Olaf Schultz, the chancellor, who comes from the Social Democratic Party.

All three parties that make up the ruling coalition, Mister Schulz's party, the Green Party and the small Free Democratic Party did really badly and they were all beaten by the AfD. It was actually the worst result in a national election for the ruling social Democrats in their entire existence, which goes back nearly 150 years. Now again, this is only a european election, not a national election. And people do tend to vote a protest vote in european elections. But still this is far far worse than in any previous european election as well.

So it was a shockingly bad night for the chancellor and it makes one wonder whether he'll see out his term. I think he probably will, but the pressure on him to go early will only increase. And apart from France and Germany, was this good showing for the right? For the far right seen elsewhere, actually it really wasn't. And that's one of the big surprises of the night overall.

If you look at all the parties of the hard nationalist right and add them together, which is tricky because they're in lots of different groups and very fragmented, you see that their support only went up from a little under 20% to around 22%. Lots of people thought that the right wing would do really quite well across the board. But apart from these big jumps in France and Germany, you didn't see that pattern repeated in other major countries. You didn't see it in Spain, where there's a hard right party called Vox that didn't do well. You certainly didn't see it in Italy, where there was a sort of shuffling among the right wing parties, but no big overall increase in Sweden, where the Sweden Democrats and other populist nationalist outfits are, you didn't see very much either.

Nothing like the earthquake that people had been fearing. So no, if you stripped out what happened in France and Germany, it wasn't a particularly good night for the hard right at all. The centre held up pretty well, but. Nevertheless there are different representatives then in the European Parliament from France and Germany leaning more right now. What does that mean for running the bloc day to day?

Yes, indeed. This shift, even though it's small and particularly coming in two key countries, will make it a little bit harder to run things in the european parliament. It's a very fragmented picture still. The centre is solid. But parts of the centre don't always vote the way that the centrists, the European Union bureaucrats want them to.

For instance, on climate change policy you see the mainstream parties getting quite nervous about that and wanting to water it down. So I think getting majorities for the policies that the EU EU wants to do that gets a little bit harder than it was before. But only a little. But certainly Mister Macron has made things harder for himself in a big way in France. Yes, absolutely.

I'm still not quite sure why he's done this. He was obviously rather humiliated by the poor showing in the european vote. But the danger for him now is that by calling this election he will not increase his vote in the national parliament, but actually decrease it. He may hand a really valuable propaganda opportunity to Marine Le Pen and her nationality. It's even possible to imagine him being forced to have a Marine Le Pen figure as prime minister of France.

I don't think that's going to happen, but voters are very unpredictable in France at the moment. At any rate, he may find that this hasn't made his position any better. It won't really affect what happens in Europe because Mister Macron will still be the president if he has to work with a prime minister who he doesn't get on with very well. While that's happened before in France and he doesn't have a majority anyway, so it wouldn't necessarily be significantly worse. But it could be a big embarrassment and we're going to find out pretty soon.

You know, the election has taken place at the end of June. Well then we look forward to speaking to you about that election in due course. Chris, thanks very much for your time. Thank you, Jason.

Matt
Hi, this is Matt and Sean from two black guys with good credit. If you own or operate a business, whether it's a local operation or a global corporation, partnering with bank of America could be your smartest move. By teaming with bank of America, you'll enjoy exclusive digital tools, award winning insights, and business solutions so powerful you'll make every move matter. Position your business to capitalize on opportunity in a moment's life. Notice visit bankofamerica.com bankingforbusiness to learn more.

What would you like the power to do? Bank of America na Copyright 2024.

Rosie Blore
Remember those days in the spring of 2020 when we thought that touching a door handle might kill us? When the sound of a cough became almost as terrifying as a gunshot? In time, we got over some of those anxieties. One disruption that persisted, though, was to children's education. Breaking News Mayor de Blasio announces he is shutting down New York City's school system.

Schools closed for months to stop the spread of the virus. Learning went online, at least for those lucky enough to have a computer and wi fi. We are increasing class time, but increasing it at home. For some, classes stopped completely, and even after schools reopened, many kids never went back. Absenteeism was a huge problem before the pandemic, but afterwards it became an even bigger problem.

Tamara Jilks Bohr
And this was an issue across the entire world. But it was an especially big problem in America, where lockdowns and school closures lasted much longer than the rest of the world. Tamara Jilks Bohr is our us policy correspondent. In America, about a quarter of students missed at least three and a half weeks of school in 2021 to 2022. And that was almost double the rate before the pandemic doubles a lot.

Rosie Blore
Why did they stop turning up? There were a lot of reasons for older students. Many of them decided to start working. They were able to get jobs and bring in money to their families. For others, they simply just lost the habit and got comfortable being home.

Tamara Jilks Bohr
Well, I spoke with Jeannie Stark, who is a counselor at Manzano High School in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Some of the stuff that would happen, when we first came back, we literally had a group of students who were still afraid to come back to school. But now many schools in America are learning how to coax pupils back to the classroom. How have they been doing that? How have they been coaxing pupils back into the classroom?

So some states allow families and even students to be punished, and other states don't allow that. So in terms of punishment, there are things like finding the parents or throwing the parents into jail. And in some states, even the kids who aren't going to school can end up in juvenile detention. But there are a lot of studies that show that this probably isn't that effective. I spoke with Kerry Rodriguez, who is the president of the National Parents Union, and she is adamant that this absenteeism issue is not about lazy kids and lazy parents.

She says that it's so much more complicated than that, and that's why she thinks that these punishments, like fines and jail time, just don't work. Many of the parents who are struggling to send their kids to school today were the struggling students of the generation before, and they just don't see the value of school and in many cases need to be convinced that they should send their kids to the same schools that didn't really serve them well. So that makes sense. Do you think the problem then is with the kids or with the parents? I think it's a combination.

I think that depending on the age of the student and other factors like how easily they can get to school on their own, it could be the parent or the kids. But I think in general, it's important to note that the parents and the kids are probably struggling to go to school for the same reasons. They might be struggling because they don't have the proper supports at home. They don't have the basic necessities like food or shelter. Or it could be that they're just not that invested in school, and that could be the kid themselves or the parents seeing how the child responds when they go to school.

Rosie Blore
What sorts of things can schools do then to try and make kids or parents feel more invested in what they get out of being at school. School. So I think the obvious answer is to improve instruction. And one way to do that is through high impact tutoring, which is basically a fancy phrase for giving kids small group instruction for about 90 minutes per week. And there was a study based on DC schools out of Stanford University that showed that such a program might actually increase attendance by about three days.

Tamara Jilks Bohr
But some schools need a much bigger improvement and a much heavier intervention for their absenteeism problem. And that might mean having to focus specifically on students who are struggling the most. That sounds quite labor intensive. Is it actually viable? It is viable if you have good data.

And what's interesting about this idea is that it can seem so simple, right? It's like, oh, of course, you find the students who are struggling, but that actually requires, like you mentioned, like, good data and somebody to have the time to comb through that data and look at student grades and attendance. So, yeah, it's both a simple solution, but also an actually difficult one to implement. So has anyone tried this and been successful? Manzano High School in Albuquerque, New Mexico, was having a huge absenteeism problem.

Over 60% of their kids missed 10% or more of the school year. So they reached out to a group of nonprofits and universities that work to help schools with these kinds of problems called grad partnerships. And a year later, their absenteeism rate actually dropped to 45%. They expect to actually drop even further this academic year. You know, we knew we needed to rely on data to help move this work forward.

So this is the principal of Menzano High School. She's the one who reached out to grad partnerships. We knew that we were going to have to identify the big things that were keeping students from coming back. So that's kind of where our work started. And together, they were able to leverage data, along with relationship building with families to help their chronic absenteeism problem.

That's when Jeannie, the counselor you heard from before, really started to get to work. We sat down and put boots on the ground, and we were calling families like, hey, you know, where are you at? And the ones we could get a hold of, we would have. That's, you know, we would know where they were, and some of them we were never able to get ahold of. Sometimes there were easy fixes, like giving a student a textbook in Spanish.

Sometimes the fixes were a bit more involved, like finding support for a family to get food or housing. The school also hosted resource fairs for the entire community where parents could get connected with programs for things like food stamps, but also potentially connect with employers if they needed a job and other things, which, you know, if you're struggling with the basics, it can be really hard to get your kid to go to school. I guess what I want to know then, is whether this is something that other schools can do. So what I think is really exciting about Menzano High School and this partnership more broadly is that it really shows the impact and the power of having students basic needs met combined with really strong relationships with people, adults in their schools. And I think what's really hopeful about this is that relationships are free, and that's something that every school can work on without an extra dollar in their bank account.

Rosie Blore
It's been fascinating to chat with you. Thank you so much, Tamara. Thank you. I appreciate it.

Simon Wright
Giving a name to a car as to a child is not to be taken lightly. Ask any parent or marketing executive. Simon Wright is the Economist's industry editor. Take the name of Elon Musk's newest progeny. It's written as a collection of strange letters, and it's apparently pronounced X Ash a twelve.

All it's going to do is contend into a lifetime of befuddled attempts at pronunciation. Mister Musk is guilty of being equally asinine with the naming of the first four models produced by his car company, the s three, X and Y model. Names that provoke the original outrage are surprisingly common in the car industry. Recently, the Aura Funky Cat, a sub brand from China's great mall Motors, was named the Aura zero three. This was apparently part of a new global brand strategy, but I think it was mainly because it sounded daft, and you can find daft names everywhere.

Peugeot's bipper teepee, now discontinued, which was a small sort of minivan, was about as bad. I should say, that Peugeot is owned by Stellantis, whose largest shareholder, Exor part, owns the Economist. Stellantis also owns Alfa Romeo and Maserati, and Exor has a large, staking Ferrari, but more on all of them later. The Nissan Cedric, a large saloon on sale from 1960 1960 to 2004, and its sister car, the Gloria, sounded like someone's great grandparents. Eventually they became the Datsun 200 series.

In many overseas markets.

Other names could be off putting or just inapt. The Studebaker dictator was renamed the commander in 1938, and I think the reasons for that should be obvious. But there was no renaming for the Suzuki SD, though it brought its owners none. Or the Mitsubishi charisma, which lacked any charisma at all and indeed lacked an h. Some carmakers have been caught out by unfortunate translations.

Chevrolet's nova means no go in Spanish, while the Mazda Laputa, translated as prostitute. Ford's pinto is probably even worse. It means small penis in brazilian slang. One way of getting around this is using a collection of letters and numbers. It's safer, but it's not brought proof.

Toyota's Mr. Two had to chop the de. In France, the full name sounded close to the word for shit.

But the latest problem with naming cars is apparently geopolitics. China's carmakers have Europe in their sights as their next market they want to expand into, and that's caused problems. Xiaomi, a chinese tech giant that's turned to car making, wants to brand just a platform underpinning its expensive Su seven saloon as the modener.

Doesn't sound like a problem, but it is, because that happens to be the name of the italian city where both Ferrari and Maserati, two pricier european marks that make fancy sports cars, hail from.

This has incurred the displeasure of the city's mayor and Italy's minister for enterprise, and it may even fall valuable italian law banning use of italian place names for foreign products. But it's not any chinese carmakers that have committed such errors. Alfa Romeo, which is a quintessential italian car brand, was forced to hastily rebrand the Milano, a small suv, as the junior days after it was launched in April. That's because it turned out the cars were made in Poland. But I wonder if before long, foreign car makers might try to win favour with chinese customers by calling one of their models the Hangzhou, after the country's car making heartland.

Perhaps they should think twice.

Jason Palmer
That's all for this episode of the intelligence. We'll see you back here tomorrow.

Matt
Hi, this is Matt and Sean from two black guys with good credit. If you own or operate a business, whether it's a local operation or a global corporation, partnering with bank of America could be your smartest move. By teaming with bank of America, you'll enjoy exclusive digital tools, award winning insights, and business solutions so powerful you'll make every move matter. Position your business to capitalize an opportunity in a moment's notice. Visit bankofamerica.com bankingforbusiness to learn more.

What would you like the power to do? Bank of America na Copyright 2024.