The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Why Should Europe Worry About the French Elections || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: July 12, 2024

After the first round of European Parliament elections, the French far-right (represented by the National Rally) had a great showing. President Macron wasn't too happy with that outcome, so he called snap elections to give his party a second shot at capturing a majority. Full Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/why-should-europe-worry-about-the-french-elections

Hey, everybody, Peter Zine here, coming to you from the Lake of the Ozarks in southern Missouri. And we're going to finish up our election series today by talking about those convoluted of the big elections that's just happened in the last week. And that is France. The backdrop is that a few weeks ago, we had European Parliament elections. And the French hard right represented by a group that calls themselves a national rally did very, very, very, very well. And the president of France, Emmanuel Macron, who's a more central. Interest Alliance saw this as a threat and decided he would try his hand at a snap elections to force the French people to support a more pragmatic government, i.e. his. In a way, it worked out. In two rounds of voting, at first, the National Rally did very, very, very, very well. And then they did very, very, very, very badly. And ultimately, they came in third behind a couple of other alliance groups, one on the left, one in the center, supporting Macron. A couple of reasons for this. The reasons that everybody are talking about, is that there's this typical pattern in French voting

where in your first voting, the first round, you vote your heart, and in the second vote, you vote your head. And so the idea is you might vote for what you're passionate about the first time around, but you're much more practical the second time around. That was definitely in play. A second one was that there's a lot of tactical voting where you could have five, six, seven, eight candidates contesting the same seat in the first round.

And then in the second round, basically everyone who was third, four, fifth, sixth, seventh dropped out in order to concentrate the oppositional votes to make sure that the national rally would not get the seat. And that meant that the national rally went from being the far away favorite to coming in a relatively distant third. But the third and far more important reason why the national rally busted was simply time. From the point the Macron called the elections to the point that we had the first round, it was only two weeks, and then only another week before we had the second round. So they really didn't have a lot of time to prepare.

There are 577 Parliament districts in France, and going into these elections, the national rally really wasn't a true national party in that they had representation and supporters in every single district. So when they had to come up with 577 candidates, one for each district, one who lived in each district, a lot of times they went with just some activists. And if you guys are politically wired, you know that there are activists in your party who are wackadoo. And so there were some wild racists and some wildly incompetent people who found themselves on the ticket for the national rally, which meant that not just that they didn't have a chance, but the candidates in the left and the center were able to parade these people nationwide and show what fools the national rally were. At least that was their view. And take this together, especially that last piece, and it worked. But we're not out of the woods yet.

Remember, there were three big factions here. You had the hard right, the national rally, you had the centrist around Macron, and then you had this left alliance that is actually four different parties made up of radicals and communists and socialists and greens. And they had the same problem that the national rally had. They only had a couple of weeks to build this electoral alliance to contest the elections. And while they came in first, they have nowhere near enough seats in the parliament to run a government. Nobody does. In fact, if you were to take any of these three factions and throw all the minor parts, parties in with them, they're still not enough. So to have a government, a majority government,

two of these three factions have to be able to work together. Well, no one wants to work with the National Rally. So that eliminates though. And for the new leftist alliance, this four-party alliance, the single largest chunk is the party of a guy named Jean Melichon. And he is basically, that's the best way to scribe this ass have. It's the personal charm of Majorie Tyler Green in the United States. He has the intelligence of Corey Bush. He makes up math like Elizabeth Warren, and he has the personality of a cold, hairy pile of vomit. He's a hateful person. He's a snake, and no one wants to work with him, but his party in that four-group coalition that is up this left of the lights is the single largest. So we already have party leaders throughout the

Leftist Alliance saying that, you know, Melly-Shan is a problem, and he will never be Prime Minister, but he now represents the single largest chunk of seats in the Parliament as part of that alliance. So we're entering into something that is very unexpected and unfamiliar for France, political and stability, because the single largest party in the overall parliament, the rally, no one wants to work with. The ruling party that works with Macron has been a little bit discredited, and then the left is an absolute mess with its titular leader, a complete moron. There is no clear path forward here, and this isn't Israel, this isn't Italy. No one here has experienced building coalition governments, and according to the French

Constitution, you can't have another election to fix this at the ballot box within a year. So you take France, which until now has been the Eurozone country with the single strongest political leadership. You basically remove it from play until such time as the French can find a way to make this work. I doubt that's going to happen in this calendar year or next calendar year. This is a really bad time for Europe to not have leadership. And if you look around Europe and see what's left, the French are to lunch, dealing with their own internal stuff. The Germans had a three-party coalition that was already incredibly weak, led by an even weaker chancellor.

And the next country down is France, which is led by someone who, on the right, Maloney. That means if you're the United States and Russia at this time, all of a sudden, Europe has become a little bit of a piece of taffy to be pulled. Now, at the moment, because of the Ukraine war, that means the ball is very clearly in the United States.

It's court. But never forget, this is an election year in the United States, too. And whether it's Biden or Trump, it's going to be difficult for Washington to focus the kind of attention on Europe, that honestly it deserves right now. So, we basically took the last big pillar of European, not solidarity, not leadership, not democracy, but coordination. And we've knocked it down.

Now that's going to be a big problem as you're going to see in the next video because this is only the beginning of what needs to be done within Europe.