Marine Le Pen’s risky comeback

0:02Good morning from the Financial Times. Today is Wednesday, July 8th, and this is your FT News briefing. Donald Trump is threatening his NATO allies again, and European far-right leaders had a hell of a Tuesday. Plus, a pair of glasses could be recording your every move, whether you like it or not. I'm Mark Filippino, and here's the news you need to start your day.

0:37U.S. President Donald Trump is going after Greenland again. That should be controlled by the United States, not by Denmark. That was at yesterday's NATO summit in Turkey. Trump threatened to remove all American troops from Europe if he doesn't get his way. And when they wouldn't go along with it, and with all the money we spend to help them with Russia, and we don't have to spend any money. We could remove all of our soldiers out of Europe. Trump also tied his threat to his frustration with European allies for not helping in the U.S. war against Iran. He made similar threats to take over Greenland at Davos back in January.

1:13The U.S., Denmark, and Greenland have been in talks ever since.

1:22a french appeals court ruled yesterday that far-right leader marine le pen can run for president next year and she says she's going to do it the judges upheld le pen's conviction of embezzling funds from the european parliament and she said last night she plans to appeal the ruling again but that could land her party ressemblément national in hot water ben hall is the ft's europe editor. He's here to tell us what this means for French politics and beyond. Hi, Ben. Hi. So, Ben, what happened yesterday? Big day for French politics. It was a big day for French politics because the country has been in suspended animation, essentially, as to which of the far-right candidates are going to be running in next year's presidential election.

2:05And Marine Le Pen was facing criminal conviction for embezzlement with a five-year ban on elected office. She appealed against that conviction and against that ban. And yesterday, an appeal court overturned the ban, but maintained her conviction and reduced the sentence to a one-year suspended prison sentence, which she would have to complete wearing an electronic tag. Now, several times in recent months, Le Pen has said she would not campaign if wearing an electronic tag. And she decided last night that she would appeal to France's highest court to overturn her conviction, overturn the electronic tag sentence.

2:55And this is a real high stakes gamble. Now, what do you mean by that? Why is it a gamble, Ben? because first of all, it risks turning the contest into a kind of Trump style confrontation with what her party says is a sort of politicized judiciary. And it's a sort of battle against the institutions. And I think that's a risk because it could turn off more mainstream voters and she would need their support if she is to win the second round runoff in the election, which is in the beginning of May next year. The second gamble is that if somehow France's highest court was to come back sooner than perhaps she expects, maybe in February or March next year, and says, actually, we uphold your conviction, we uphold your electronic tag ban, or even worse for her, decides that the ban should be longer than the Rassemblement campaign would be thrown into disarray.

3:57Right, because then she'd be back to where she was before yesterday's ruling and wouldn't be able to run. Ben, what else do I need to know about this election? So this is a race to succeed Emmanuel Macron, whose second term comes to an end in May. The first round of the election is on the 18th of April, and the second round two weeks later. The real threat from the Rassemblement National is because they are streets ahead in the polls, and they are facing a whole host of potential opponents. So the sort of mainstream opposition is hugely divided. I think there are some sort of 35 candidates or potential candidates for this race, which means that unless they decide to coalesce around one candidate, the risk is that they will not be able to build up enough momentum to stop the far right from winning the presidency outright in a second round.

4:57Well, what are the implications of that then? That would be a massive deal for France and Europe because although this party is not the party it once was under Marine Le Pen's father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, which was a racist, openly anti-Semitic party, very anti-EU, wanted to pull France out of the EU, it is still a radical party. It's a huge force for disruption in the EU as well as in France itself. That's the FT's Ben Hall. Thank you so much, Ben. Thank you.

5:35Nigel Farage, the leader of the right-wing populist Reform UK Party, announced yesterday that he's resigning as MP. But it might be a short absence. He's planning to run for the same seat he's leaving. This will be a people versus the establishment by-election. It's a chance to stick two fingers up to the entire establishment, to frankly tell them where to go. Farage's move comes after criticism over the past couple of months. News broke in April that he failed to declare a five million pound campaign gift in 2024. Over the weekend, it came out that he didn't disclose other benefits like private security, staff and accommodation.

6:17Parliament is now investigating if Farage broke campaign rules. He denies any wrongdoing over donations. In the meantime, he wants to prove that he's popular enough to win back his seat. Other MPs aren't impressed. Several have accused Farage of distracting the public from the ongoing investigation. Most parties have announced they won't run candidates in the election, which would basically render a reform victory meaningless. For more on Farage's resignation, listen to the most recent episode of the FT's Political Fix podcast. We'll have a link to that in the show notes.

6:55Meta is testing a prototype of controversial AI glasses. They would continuously record audio and take photos every few seconds. That's according to people familiar with the matter. Here to tell us more is the FT's Hannah Murphy. Hi, Hannah. Hi there. So tell me more about how these glasses would work. This is a kind of new frontier for AI that's focused on helping you with memory and focus. So if you want to ask the AI, where did I leave my keys? What did I say to so-and-so earlier today? The idea is that these glasses would capture your day through the photos, through the audio, and then you'd be able to recall any of that and go back on that whenever you wanted.

7:42So obviously this raises some privacy concerns, right? Yes, very much so. In some ways, if you're choosing to wear them, that's obviously up to you. But the fear is if you are captured as a third party in these, how can you possibly consent if people are walking around recording absolutely everything they're doing? As such, there's sort of legal gray areas. For example, in many states in the US, there's wiretapping laws that say that, you know, you need two people to give consent on both sides in order for an audio recording to be made. It's unclear exactly what Meta will put in place to make sure that the company doesn't breach that and also how users will then use them and could potentially abuse them.

8:29What does Meta have to say about these privacy concerns? We haven't heard from Meta yet directly on the super sensing glasses. However, they've certainly been making a point of saying that they want to consider all the privacy implications. So a big question is how will they signal to these third parties, to non-wearers, that they are on and gathering data? So currently in the smart glasses that Meta has, there's a little LED in the right hand corner of the frame that lights up when the wearer is actively filming or taking a photograph. However, my understanding is that execs are planning not to activate that for these super sensing features.

9:10At the same time, my understanding is Meta don't necessarily want to hold all the raw footage and audio and store that and make that available to the users. Instead, they'll extract the metadata and send that to the server where it can then be queried by AI. So there's fewer privacy risks there would be that argument. Hannah, how do these glasses fit in with Meta's overall AI business plan? So firstly, very specifically, Meta is looking more broadly at these always-on devices. It also bought an AI-powered pendant company called Limitless. So that records, transcribes conversations in real time.

9:52So this is a kind of growing space. But if we step back, you know, Meta and Mark Zuckerberg in particular started investing billions of dollars into this vision for the metaverse. This kind of avatar filled space. You'd all need a headset to log in. Then, you know, that didn't really gain traction with consumers. And you've seen him narrow the strategy towards the smart glasses. So this could potentially be a new form factor that replaces mobile phones for AI that we'll all one day walk around and be able to ask our AI questions, engage with a chat bot, message, wearing a pair of glasses. So we should say that Google back in May also announced that they're releasing smart glasses.

10:39Do you think that these kinds of products will actually take off with customers? I think it's too early to say. If you look at sort of ChatGPT consumer app 2022 explosion, right, that just took over. You have huge uptick in users. With the glasses, it's far fewer users. It's unclear now if they'll really catch on quite in the way that Meta wants. At some point, the features have to be more useful to you such that you overcome any concerns about your privacy and feel comfortable and trust Meta. And if Meta can gain that trust and provide useful features that people want in their daily life, then you can see a way that these begin to catch on.

11:26Hannah Murphy covers Meta for the FT from San Francisco. Thanks, Hannah. Thanks.

11:35You can read more on all these stories for free when you click the links in our show notes. This has been your daily FT News Briefing. Check back tomorrow for the latest business news.

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