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00:00 Well, our Chief Foreign Minister Rob Parsons is joining me now here on set.
00:03 Rob, I put this to our guest in the last half hour,
00:07 that there had been these rumours, hadn't there,
00:08 that Macron may dissolve the Parliament if the polls turned out to be correct.
00:14 But most people were kind of rejecting those rumours,
00:16 saying there's no way he'll do that.
00:18 And in the end, he did.
00:19 I mean, it was such a shock, wasn't it?
00:20 Yeah, a total shock, but apparently not to Emmanuel Macron.
00:24 I mean, it's interesting that the final results
00:27 in the French part of this European election
00:30 pretty much tied with what the opinion polls were saying in France.
00:35 So it looks rather as if Emmanuel Macron had been doing the arithmetic
00:39 and looking at it all himself.
00:41 And that's why he was able to react with such speed.
00:44 And, you know, saying that with a result like that,
00:48 he couldn't just stand by and not do anything.
00:50 And that the constitutional thing to do and the democratic thing to do
00:55 was call for new elections and see whether the national rally
00:59 can come up with the same result or whether other forces can gather to oppose them.
01:05 That, I think, is where he found himself in that moment
01:09 when the poll results suddenly came to fruition.
01:13 And the national rally won that crushing victory by 32% to about 15%
01:18 for a renaissance Emmanuel Macron's party.
01:20 It is an amazing change of fortunes, if you like.