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00:00We can now bring in our editor Angela Diffley. Angela, good afternoon.
00:03Atal tended his resignation. The president has refused to accept it for now,
00:07given that we have the Olympics around the corner, presumably.
00:11Yeah, that is clear and clear to all. And Macron said, the communique that was issued after this,
00:20it was explicitly said that Atal had been asked to stay on to ensure the stability of the country.
00:26This is not a time to have France wobbling just ahead of the Olympics. Inevitably,
00:32there is instability because nobody knows what is going to happen next. Nobody knows
00:36what the next government might look like. We know that Atal will not be prime minister
00:42unless he is re-chosen. That is not a possibility that can be ruled out either.
00:47What looks most likely at the moment is some sort of centre-left government.
00:53We saw that this left bloc won the highest number of votes last night. Within that bloc is a far
00:59left component. Emmanuel Macron has made clear he doesn't want them anywhere near government.
01:05Neither, of course, does he want the far right anywhere near government. So it's the next
01:10biggest number of votes within that far left, that left wing bloc which won last night,
01:15are the socialists, mainstream socialists. It's possible that they might form some sort
01:21of coalition with the centrists of Macron's and other various smaller parties. That's possible.
01:26That throws up a very interesting possibility of perhaps the person chosen to be prime minister
01:33being former president, François Hollande. There are a number of possibilities, but that is
01:39certainly a very interesting one where you would have François Hollande, former socialist president,
01:45who in a sense nurtured the career of Emmanuel Macron before, he later said, being betrayed by him,
01:53then coming back as prime minister and prime minister with a lot of power because it is clear
01:59now after this election that Macron has been severely weakened. The centre of gravity in French
02:06politics now moves to the Assemblée Nationale. So Hollande, if it is Hollande, will not just be any
02:12prime minister. He will be a prime minister with significant power. That is unless and until any
02:17such government is coupled because its programme is so unclear. Will it last? And of course, there is
02:24the option of dissolving parliament in a year. Exactly. Anything could happen with Macron.
02:30We'll see. Let's talk about the far right because yes, they didn't come out ahead like they wanted
02:37to. They didn't get the absolute majority they wanted to. But their seat in parliament has never
02:43been so large. So it's still a victory for them, even though they're not going to be getting the
02:48prime minister's post. It is. And ironically, although they were roundly rejected, the areas
02:56where they perform best consistently top the polls as the key concerns of the French and among those
03:03law and order and security and immigration. Cost of living, of course, as well, but that each party
03:09has some sort of policy for that. So that is a paradox. The reality is that if you look at the
03:18Rassemblement National Manifesto, much of it would sit comfortably in a centre-right or right-wing
03:24government in many countries in Europe. They planned, for example, to not make citizenship
03:32automatic if you were born in France to two foreign parents. That is already the case in, for
03:36example, Denmark. They planned to restrict some welfare benefits, some medical aid to foreigners.
03:44They planned to perhaps to curtail the rights of some people to have family reunited
03:53immigrants coming in. All of those things you find in very many mainstream right-wing manifestos.
03:59So it's not so much what they were promising. It's the fear that were Marine Le Pen then to
04:04become president in three years, they might become much more radical. And it's also, I think, they
04:10were rejected because too many people worried about the ethos underlying the Front National,
04:16had it really shed its racist anti-Semitic history or not, and also worries about how
04:23competent it might be because it has so little experience. I would also say this is the country
04:30of human rights, and it's a very important part of modern French identity, the concept that they
04:38invented human rights. And I think French people had a real problem with a far-right candidate.
04:44Who knows how long this will last.