French fried: will the election lead to chaos?

This episode explores the tumultuous political landscape in France following President Emmanuel Macron's decision to call a snap parliamentary election, examining potential outcomes and their implications.

1. Macron's decision to call a snap election is a high-risk strategy to regain control and clarify his political stance.
2. The National Rally could lead France towards extreme right-wing policies, emphasizing stringent immigration controls.
3. A left-wing bloc offers alternative policies focusing on economic relief and progressive social measures.
4. The likelihood of a hung parliament could lead to prolonged political instability in France.
5. The outcome of this election could dramatically affect Macron's legacy and France's future political landscape.

1. Introduction

Rosie Blore introduces the episode, outlining the unexpected political developments in France. Sophie Pedder: "This decision by the president in France to dissolve the National Assembly was one that nobody saw coming, not even his prime minister."

2. The Political Landscape

Discussion on the potential outcomes of Macron's political gamble and its implications for France's future. Sophie Pedder: "If he was seeking a sort of test, and the word he used was clarification, thinking that perhaps this was a protest vote that was only about Europe and it wouldn't actually apply to national voting, then he seems to have been quite mistaken."

3. Political Promises and Policies

Analysis of the promises made by the National Rally and the left-wing bloc, focusing on economic and immigration issues. Sophie Pedder: "On the hard left. You've got similar sort of promises, slightly different. They're promising to cap energy prices and they're promising to raise the minimum wage."

4. Possible Outcomes

Exploration of scenarios depending on the election results, with potential challenges in forming a stable government. Sophie Pedder: "I think if we don't have a majority on either party, we're looking at a lot of instability in France."

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Both the left and right are likely to do well in France’s upcoming parliamentary poll, with President Emmanuel Macron’s party squeezed in the middle. The snap election could leave the country in chaos. In America, recreational use of weed is now commonplace, but what impact does it have on users’ wellbeing (10:06)? And the joy of short books: the intense pleasure of a quickie (17:40).

People

Emmanuel Macron, Marine Le Pen, Jean Luc Melanchon, Jordan Bardella

Content Warnings:

None

Ryan Reynolds
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Ryan Reynolds
The Economist.

Rosie Blore
Hello and welcome to the intelligence from the Economist. I'm your host, Rosie Blore. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the event. Shaping your world in America, buying marijuana can be a bit like buying wine these days, with a choice of flavors and blends. Widespread legalisation means we can also measure what using weed does to your health and career prospects.

Should we be less chilled about it? And are you always saying you want to read more but don't quite get round to it? Our correspondent extols the wonders of short books that you can slip in your pocket and get through in a day.

But first, french politicians are scrambling. For the past ten days, they've been heading off on the campaign trail after President Emmanuel Macron called a snap parliamentary election. Even for a man with a penchant for the theatrical, he married his drama teacher. Remember, Macron stole the political limelight this week, dissolved parliament. Snap elections.

Unidentified Speaker
Je di so donc ce soir. French President Emmanuel Macron, famous for risk taking, just pulled the pin on a political grenade, calling a snap election for early June, weeks before the Olympics. But will his performance set the stage alight or just burn the theater down? Since 2022, Macron has had a minority in parliament. He's managed to cobble together support to get legislation passed.

Rosie Blore
But it's been a slog in the recent EU polls. Marine Le Pen's national rally party picked up twice as many votes as Macron's renaissance. Macron felt the political situation had become untenable.

Le Pen says this is an opportunity for her party to take control and pull France out of a rut.

But the gamble in launching this unexpected campaign could be Macron's undoing. So far, polling suggests his party may even come a disappointing third place. Instead of a rut, France looks more likely to be on the precipice of political chaos. I've covered french politics for a number of years, and honestly, this is the most extraordinary, unexpected decision that we've seen in a very long time. Sophie Peder is the economist's Paris bureau chief.

Sophie Pedder
This decision by the president in France to dissolve the National assembly was one that nobody saw coming, not even his prime minister. So we were roughly halfway through the campaign to the first vote on June 30. How's the situation looking now? Well, it's not looking good for Emmanuel Macron's party. If he was seeking a sort of test, and the word he used was clarification, thinking that perhaps this was a protest vote that was only about Europe and it wouldn't actually apply to national voting, then he seems to have been quite mistaken, because the polls show at the moment that the national rally is way ahead, with over 30% of the first round vote.

And in second place is a bloc that is composed of four parties on the left, dominated by the most extreme left of them. And Macrons party is trailing in a poor third place. And those polls havent shifted a great deal since the election was called. So its going to take a lot, I think, in the remaining time for Macrons party to shift the dynamics of this vote. So it sounds like people really do want change.

I think that's right. Macron is not a popular president. His style grates with a lot of people. He has pushed through controversial legislation. I'm thinking, particularly, for example, of the pension reform, which raised the pension age from 62 to 64 years.

Not very high by international standards, but it drew an awful lot of people onto the streets with widespread protests for weeks and weeks. The great question now really is which sort of change they want? Do they really want the national rally? That's the party that's decent, descended from the extreme right party of Jean Marie le Pen? Or do they in fact want a left wing program that is dominated by Jean Luc Melanchon's party on the hard left.

Rosie Blore
So can you paint a picture for us what those choices really mean? What sorts of things we might expect from the national rally, or what we might expect from the left? Well, it's interesting because the two parties have something in common, surprisingly, and that is promised to do something urgently and immediately about the cost of living. So if you look at the national rally, they are promising immediately to bring down the VAT rate on fuel bills, energy, electricity, petrol at the pump. That is something that is incredibly popular.

Sophie Pedder
On the hard left. You've got similar sort of promises, slightly different. They're promising to cap energy prices and they're promising to raise the minimum wage. So it's a more classic left wing program where the two blocks completely diverge, obviously, is on subjects such as immigration. There, the national rally, its flagship promise is to end the automatic right to citizenship to all people born on french soil.

If you look at the hard left, they are absolutely against anything that calls into question the rights to citizenship. And their measures are more directed at protecting refugees, protecting those who dont yet have the right to stay in France and making it easier for them to do so. What about if neither side wins a majority here? Well, I think at the moment, that is now looking like the most likely outcome that you would have a hung parliament, possibly with the national rally, there's the single biggest party, but it's not clear. And then it's up to the president to name a prime minister and ask that prime minister to try to form a government.

Now, this is something that, again, we're really entering uncharted territory, because in the past, you have had periods where the prime minister and the president are not of the same political family, but the party in government has a majority without one. It makes it extremely difficult because, for one thing, Jordan Bardella, who is this 28 year old head of the national rally who Marine Le Pen has said would be her choice of prime minister, he now says he wouldn't want to be prime minister unless he gets a majority. I think he's anticipating already the problems that that would cause, and the same would potentially happen on the hard left. So I think if we don't have a majority on either party, we're looking at a lot of instability in France. If we're expecting instability ahead, how important do you think the personalities involved are going to be?

Rosie Blore
And can you tell us a little bit about some of these characters who could become extremely prominent in french politics? Well, the first person to know about, of course, is Jordan Bardella.

Sophie Pedder
He is only 28 years old. He's had an extraordinary meteoric rise within the party. He was attracted to joining it when he was only 16 years old. Old he was a teenager, and Marine Le Pen took over the party. He joined it, and within a matter of years, he'd worked his way up through local politics and is very much seen as her protege.

So he is the choice that she would make for prime minister were her party to be in a position to form a government. And he's got an interesting backstory, too, which is very helpful to her at elections.

He was raised in social housing in a suburb north of Paris, so he has a sort of credibility with people who have difficulties meeting their bills at the end of the month.

But he's also of italian origin, which again, in some ways seems to lend legitimacy to his arguments about immigration in France. How he's not against immigration per se, but it has to be the right sort of immigration. And on the left, there are just too many figures fighting it out, trying to get themselves in position to put themselves forward as prime minister. There had been talk at one point of Jean Luc Melanchon, the old former trotskyist head of the far left, but he's also suggested he wouldn't put himself forward, which leaves a wide open race among a number of candidates. Sophie, it's going to be fascinating to watch.

Rosie Blore
Just lastly, what do you think this means for Macron? He's done so much to change France. Is his legacy now in jeopardy? Well, it's certainly a question. And I think that his concern was that it was already in jeopardy because in 2027, he might have to hand over the Elysee palace keys to Marine Le Pen.

Sophie Pedder
I mean, that's a bit like two terms of Obama led to a term of Trump in the US. But instead of that, he could end up with his last three years in office marked by chronic instability and potentially damaging policies that undo what he has put in place. I think that either way, it's going to be quite difficult for him to hold on to the legacy that he was hoping to protect. Sophie, thank you so much for talking to me. It's a pleasure.

Thanks, Rosie.

Unidentified Speaker
Curious about the strategies behind successful leadership in the age of AI Amazon Web services conversations with leaders podcast presents candid discussions with top executives, delving into their experiences, insights, and perspectives on navigating challenges and driving innovation in today's business landscape. Join the conversation and subscribe today. Available on all major podcast platforms.

Rosie Blore
When the Mighty Diamonds recorded their 1981 single pass, the Coochie, smoking Weed was cool and illicit enough to merit writing songs about.

In recent years, marijuana has become legal in many places, but few countries have taken to it quite like America. Recreational weed is now legal in nearly half of all us states. Many others will vote on legalization in November. I don't know if I want to do this. It's just weed.

Unidentified Speaker
It's not heroin. Now everyone from the troubled youth of HBO's euphoria to billionaire tech bosses are openly smoking joints. I mean, it's legal, right? It's totally legal. Okay?

The video of billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk smoking marijuana during a live interview Thursday has translated to a financial hit on his company. But aside from offending a few british investors, is it a problem that marijuana's. Gone mainstream nearly 11 million american adults get high every day.

Rosie Blore
Doug Dawson is a data journalist at the Economist. Using marijuana is much more popular than it was even a decade ago. Back in 2011, before any states had legalized the drug for recreational use, only around one in ten adults use marijuana at least once a year. Today, with weed legal in 24 states for recreational use, the figure is more like one in five. So who's using the marijuana?

What do you know about the age group, the gender, anything that we know about them? Right. So this is very clear from the data. The concerns about teenagers using marijuana are not really relevant today. It's mostly adults and it's mostly older adults.

Mint Mobile Unlimited Premium
It's like people in their forties, fifties and sixties. Like, that's where you see the biggest growth in usage since this wave of legalization. That's fascinating. So I was expecting you to say the kind of 20 somethings, 30 somethings. But actually it's been the people who've been the long term marijuana users who are actually continuing to use it.

Yeah, yeah. It's definitely the case that the biggest growth in the last decade has been older Americans, people sort of over age 35, you know, forties, fifties, that kind of thing. But as you say, making it legal has increased overall usage. It used to be that you got a bag of marijuana and that's what you got. You got whatever the illicit provider of the drug had.

And now it's almost like shopping for marijuana is like shopping for wine or cheese. It's just finding your own preferred taste or strain or experience, and it's just much more sophisticated, much more refined experience. You say that shopping for weed is a bit more like shopping for wine these days. How does marijuana consumption compared to alcohol consumption? So far, more people drink alcohol than use marijuana.

Around two thirds of american adults have had a drink in the past year, making it about three times as popular as marijuana. But marijuana users are using the drug much more frequently than they did in the past. A paper out last month that got a lot of media attention estimated that the number of daily or near daily marijuana users, so that's people who use the drug at least two out of every three days now exceeds the number of people who use alcohol every day. And this trend towards more frequent marijuana usage is worrying some researchers. So why is it worrying researchers?

So there are a few concerns. First, past research has found a link between regular marijuana use and schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders. Heavy marijuana use may also lead to a higher risk of heart attacks and strokes. And when I looked at the data, which comes from the national Survey on Drug Use and Health, I found that, in fact, there is actually a relationship between frequent marijuana use and overall health. So when american adults were asked to rate their general health from poor to excellent, just 42% of daily or near daily marijuana users said that they had very good or excellent health, compared with 53% of monthly users and 56% of yearly ones.

Daily users are also more likely to report being depressed, and they're more likely to take prescription drugs for their mental health. And some experts think that frequent marijuana use might also affect things like concentration and memory, things like that. So there's always been this stereotype of, like, the lazy stoner. What do you think about that? Does that fit with what you found?

You know, I went into this story expecting there to be very little relationship between regular marijuana usage and how you fare in the, in the labor market, but it actually does seem to matter. We found that daily users are, on the one hand, they're only slightly less likely to be employed than monthly users, and they work about the same number of hours. But the data also show that heavy marijuana users do tend to skip work more often than casual users, and they also earn less. So what conclusions can we draw, then, from what you found about who's using it, how they're using it, and the effects it has on their prospects? You know, first of all, it's important to note that these kinds of survey data, they're correlations.

So we can't say that frequent marijuana usage causes poorer health or causes lower incomes. It's just correlations. So we shouldn't overstate the risks associated with marijuana. You know, looking at alcohol, the risks of alcohol use are still far greater than those of marijuana. The deaths attributed to alcohol are tens of thousands a year.

So it's important to kind of put this into perspective and recognize that alcohol use is still far more dangerous than marijuana use. But it's really tricky, because if you conduct a survey with a million people and you ask them about their use of an illegal drug, they're not going to be necessarily very forthcoming with information about it. And now more than half of Americans live somewhere where it's legal and totally acceptable to use recreationally. So our understanding of these kinds of drugs and how they affect all sorts of aspects of our lives is only going to increase now that we have this giant sample of people and it's legal and acceptable in so many more places. Doug, thank you so much for your time.

Yeah, thanks, Rosie. Last month, checks and balance. Our show on us politics took a deeper dive into the impact of legalizing cannabis and went on a tour of weed shops in downtown New York. You'll need to be a subscriber to Economist podcast Plus. To listen, click on the link in the show notes to find out more.

Stephanie Studa
I think the short book has been unloved. Stephanie Studa is the economist us digital editor. But it has so much going for it, and I'm going to start with its most straightforward appeal. You will get to the end of it. You can finish short books in a day and even a single sitting because they're small.

They can travel around with you in a bag or a coat pocket, ready to be pulled out in a quiet moment. And they're a great way to discover new styles and authors without having to commit to a really long book. The reading experience is different, too. I think you get the satisfaction of finishing the book with all of it still fresh in your mind. So it's this intense and immersive reading experience, and I find that a real luxury in a world that is filled with distractions.

So next time, don't grab your smartphone, grab a short book. Here are my favorite non fiction ones that you can read in a day.

Rosie Blore
Six records of a Floating Life by Shen fu translated by Leonard Pratt and. Jiang Su Hui it's someone's memoir about true love during their lifetime. Shen fu, the author, was able to marry the love of his life. Shen fu's wife sought out a concubine for him. She thought this was important for his standing, even for his happiness, although they both had a loving relationship.

Stephanie Studa
And the text also implies that she had sex with the concubine. In other sections, Xun fu talks about the picnics. He goes on. He loved flower arranging, but in many ways he wasn't able to rise up the ranks in the government bureaucracy. He was a scholar who at the time would probably have been seen as a little bit of a failure.

And so there's the ordinariness of his account, matched with this lovely poetic memory of his life with somebody that he truly loved.

Rosie Blore
Oranges by John McPhee this book, which. Was based on an essay which was published in the New Yorker magazine in 1966, really defined a new sort of journalism when it came out. He is mostly looking at the rise of frozen orange juice concentrate after the second world war, and he goes in search of Florida's orange barrens, the pickers, the packers, the pomologists, and he really gets under the skin of an orange. He covers the magical world of the sex life of oranges. He travels around the world to see how people eat and enjoy oranges from culture to culture.

Stephanie Studa
So this is really everything you ever wanted to know about oranges and stuff that you didn't know that you needed to know.

Rosie Blore
A room of one's own by Virginia. Woolf this is among the 20th century's most influential essays. It originated in two lectures that she gave in 1928 to students at Cambridge University's two women's colleges, and she lands her best known line by page two a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction, she says. You can feel her wry humor about this topic that is actually making her really angry. And that anger builds over the course of the essay.

Stephanie Studa
She's turned away from a library in what she refers to as Oxbridge, a thinly veiled reference to Oxford and Cambridge. She notices how much richer the men's colleges are, how lavish their luncheons, their grandeur and wealth. In many ways, the lot of women has vastly improved in the centuries since Woolf wrote this essay. But it still feels like essential reading, in particular as a reflection on sections of society that still feel like they don't have access to education, don't have access to art or the time and space to indulge in it or make a career of it.

Rosie Blore
A man's Place by Annie Erno translated. By Tanya Leslie Annie Erno received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2022. She was known early on in her literary career for using fiction as a way to convey her own life experiences. But then, in the early 1980s, she turned to writing a biography of her father who had died, and she attempted to do that by writing a novel again, and she just found that she couldn't do it. She abandoned that attempt, and she explains in this book, she realized she had no right to take an artistic approach, to try to convey a life that was governed by necessity.

Stephanie Studa
Her father was a farmer who then rose to working in a factory and then became a shopkeeper. And it's the story of a generation of french rural workers, but also a study of a father she loved but from whom she felt she had grown distant over the years. And she's trying to do justice to his life story.

Rosie Blore
To see Stephanie's full list of books to read in a day, click on the link in the show notes or find it in the Economist reads section of our website, where you can see recommendations on everything from climbing mountains to the indian economy.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. Let us know what you think of the show. You can get a in touch@podcastseconomist.com we'll see you back here tomorrow.

Unidentified Speaker
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