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00:00Joining me now to discuss is Marc Perelman, our French politics editor, and Marc, look,
00:04if this alliance holds, polls suggest the left could do pretty well in this election, so actually
00:11these conversations happening today are key, aren't they?
00:14Absolutely, they are key. They will define the election, clearly, because those discussions
00:20have been going on. They're parallel discussions. One is about a platform,
00:25a common platform in a rush. I should say four parties need to get together and essentially
00:30lay out 10, 12 ideas that they want to push during those elections. That's number one.
00:37On the parallel track, you have 577 seats up for grabs, and they have to figure out
00:44how to field only one candidate in each circumscription, as they're called here in
00:51France, in each constituency. That's obviously a tall order because you have four parties.
00:57Let's not forget, in 2022, they managed to do this. This was also a surprise alliance,
01:03but they had more time to do it. At the time, there was really one party that had the upper
01:08hand, France, involved because they were coming off the 22% score by their leader,
01:13Jean-Luc Mélenchon, at the presidential election. That's not the case anymore.
01:17The European elections, we've seen the socialists do 14%, France about 10%. The communists and the
01:24Greens are really a single point percentage. This was really not a good election for them.
01:30Now they have to figure out how many seats will each party have and who will go. This is right
01:36now. They have up until Sunday to register the candidates. They're running against the clock
01:41right now, but they have to have an agreement if they want to survive because the polls show
01:47if they go together, they can have a sizable, even maybe a majority in parliament. That's a big if.
01:54But if they go divided, then they're essentially dead because they'll have a dozen MPs there,
02:00a couple of dozens there, but they will have no leverage whatsoever nationally. That's why,
02:06despite bitter disagreements, especially since the war in Gaza, we've heard vivid accusations,
02:12sometimes personal insults flying between them. They've now decided we have a big danger. The
02:19national rally is on the cusp of power. We need to get united. Forget our disagreements. Let's get
02:24together and form this alliance. This will be key in the coming hours. We'll know if this will bear
02:29fruit or not. Right. And where might that leave Emmanuel Macron, the president, if that left-wing
02:34alliance holds? Because we know that the far-right have a significant base of support. We saw that in
02:40the European elections. So we could end up in a situation where the left does pretty well,
02:45the right does pretty well, and it doesn't leave a lot for the president and the centre.
02:49No, he would be in a world of trouble if this happens. Obviously, when he decided to dissolve
02:55the National Assembly, I guess his idea was that there will be fracture on the right. We are seeing
03:01this happen. And there would be division on the left. And that's exactly what's not happening.
03:07And so this means that instead of how he envisioned this, which he laid out yesterday during a long
03:14press conference, that he would be a centrist bloc fighting off the extreme left and the extreme
03:20right, he could end up being sandwiched between clearly a strong national rally and a unified
03:27leftist coalition. And there was a projection by our colleagues from Le Figaro this morning,
03:33this is extrapolation, but taking the results from European elections and trying to see what this
03:39would mean in a legislative election. And out of the 577 seats, it shows that 536 of them,
03:49so essentially 90%, you would have a national rally candidate versus a leftist candidate,
03:56and there will only be 40 or so cases where Macron's candidate would be able to make it to
04:02the second round. Obviously, this is just an idea and a hypothesis. But this would be a catastrophe
04:08for Emmanuel Macron because he would be really a lame duck president until 2027. He already said
04:15that he would never resign. But clearly, if this happened, this would be the nightmare scenario,
04:21and a scenario unleashed by one person, Emmanuel Macron.
04:25Fascinating. Thanks very much, Mark Perelman, for us there.