The Republicans

So I think on the center right, they more or less have a plan to converge.

I think it's a bigger question to understand what Retailleau, so the candidate for Les Républicains, is going to do, whether he will eventually merge with them or not.

I tend to think that he won't, also for the survival of the party.

But right now he's only polling at seven, so it's a difficult campaign.

And I think in that scenario, it's easy for her.

I think she has a good chance, let's say, of winning the general election.

Maybe not win an absolute majority, but win a sufficiently large relative majority that she can govern with a bit of the center-right or a bit of Les Républicains.

And so I think that's the scenario that I think is kind of the soft scenario in a sense.

voter.

I think you had that in America where you had Democrats who voted for Trump who would never have voted for the Republicans in the past and they just saw something in Trump that they liked briefly.

And the same in the UK where a lot of hardline labor voters on the left suddenly decided to vote for Reform UK because it was anti-immigrant, I guess, or the right wing of the Conservative Party.

Okay, something that interests me in your book was this far-right billionaire, ultra-conservative

been taxing us, trying for us to give more and we've had like nothing in return.

French politician Shannon Saban is from the conservative Les Républicains party.

to

be fully honest with you i cannot recognize my country

We're talking about a second round runoff between two extreme parties.

Why? Why? because the kind of Republican moderate stuff has done nothing.

Everything is sort of symbol politics.

What has changed in spending? What has changed in internal governance of France? Nothing that anyone can really point to, which is why I think Macron would have a very hard time if he wasn't term-limited.

You know, you can't have lower taxes that you want at the same time as having more benefits, which you also want.

And she, that was Valérie Pécresse of Les Républicains, the centre-right party, and she, in British terms, she lost her deposit.

She got less than 5% of the vote.

And, you know, which just shows how very difficult it is to convince French voters that they actually need to bite the bullet.

They're wanting to see a removal from people like Eric Zemmour, from Marine Le Pen, from people who really espouse those values.

And because of Macron and his kind of title as a centrist, but his really, honestly, he functions as a center Republican or even worse, some of his supporters.

Some of his policies have been atrocious.

People are now saying, OK, well, we don't need Gabriel Atal because he's also basically the new Macron under the centrist party renaissance.

All of them.

And they were replaced by grey men in suits from the various ministries, from the Élysées, and people who were on the Republican side, the right wing of the political spectrum.

Whereas all those young people were either apolitical, technocratic, or they were leaning centre-left.

I think that was quite telling.