Is France the Canary? The End of the Centre and Europe’s Generational Revolt

0:00David McWilliams: It's all about France on the podcast this week. We are looking at demography, sociology, psychology, politics, and of course, culture. And what happens in France tends to be imitated all around Europe. So it's all about France, but it's about Europe. It's about this polling crisis that France is facing. and it's about whether or not this is a key moment in history or just a blip. Spoiler alert, I think it's a key moment. Talk to you all in a couple of minutes.

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2:04David McWilliams: How you doing there? It is a big, big podcast today because it's going to be about the reaction to what we saw on the streets, in the capitals, in the journals, online, of events largely based in France, but rippling out throughout the rest of continental Europe. Is this the end of the center? Is this a massively big, momentous moment where things pivot? Is it revenge on the 68th generation by their grandchildren who have been disenfranchised by what the Americans call the boomers? Is it the sign of economic frailty? Is it a sign of political frailty? Is it John Holly crisis or an omni crisis, a crisis coming from so many different angles?

2:54A multi-crisis, maybe.

2:54David McWilliams: Even a multi-crisis, even a multi-crisis, exactly. So we're going to try and make sense of the last, it's really been a week of rioting in France. but it's been bubbling under for a while. It is, on the one hand, you could call it pure vandalism. On the other hand, you could call it an expression of some pent-up anger. But it's very, very clear that European politics is shifting to a much more radical side. And the question is, is this a permanent shift? Is this the future we're seeing playing out on our screens? or is this an iteration of a move in politics? But it's pretty huge. Yeah. Or is this, you know, I've been wondering, and we've mentioned it before, is this the culmination of the Steve Bannon effect and how they have been whipping up the European right wing and left wing.

3:56All wings. Yeah, all wings, yeah. I mean, the funniest thing is now - Just extremism in general.

4:01David McWilliams: The left wing are offering communism and the right wing are offering national socialism, neither of which have a very, very good historical precedence of fixing things. Yeah. But they are very, very violent. We're going to skip to it. So, for example, the left are blaming billionaires and the right are blaming immigrants. Yeah. And nobody's looking at themselves in the mirror and saying, well, what about us? Yeah. What have we got to do with it? Today we're going to talk about generational appropriation of assets and wealth and opportunities. We're going to talk about the economics of this polycrisis, why it's all coming at the one time.

4:37David McWilliams: We're going to look at the kind of cultural shifts within the centre-right and centre-left parties, which have left them really flat-footed, simply because they have been, probably it's fair to say, taken over by a very educated elite in the last 20 years. Like I was just even thinking today before the podcast, you know, think about even the Irish left. None of the leaders of the Irish left speak with, for example, proper Dublin accents. You'd expect them, if they're the party of the working class, you'd expect them to speak like the working class, but they're educated. Like the Social Democrats are all Trinity graduates.

5:12Ivanya Bakshic is a Trinity graduate. And who else is a Trinity graduate? You. And, yeah, but I'm the leader of a left-wing party. The head of Sinn Féin. Right, yeah. So we have... But what's wrong with that? No, it's indicative of the capture of the left by the educated elite. Okay, gotcha. That's what I'm saying. from Mary Lou to Ivana to Holly, even in Ireland. Sorry, we're just getting a bit Irish here. We're going to leave Ireland aside. We're not even going to talk about Ireland today. But I'm just saying it's an interesting phenomenon that one of the critiques of the centre-left

5:46David McWilliams: is that they've lost connection with their own people, the working class that they are supposed to. Or at least in Das Kapital, the books that they've read, they're supposed to be representing the working class. and to a degree they're not. But isn't this the same as the Democrats in the US? They've lost connection with their roots. Absolutely. When the Democrats started to falter, i.e. when Trump first came in, it was very much leveled at them that they were a coalition, they were a tripartite coalition of Wall Street, Hollywood and Silicon Valley. So the top of the Democrats, this is when Zuckerberg was a lefty.

6:25This was Zuckerberg. Short-lived. Yeah, it was short-lived. But actually, it'll probably go back left again, depending on who gets in now, right? It's true, yeah. But we're going to look at various differences. We're going to look at the economics and why now. We're going to look at that sort of cultural moment, why now. We're also going to look at that weird combination that our friend Neil Howe talked about, is that there are these great big cycles in the world. Yeah. And sometimes these cycles come crashing into one moment, this poly crisis moment, and we start again. Yeah, Nielhau was the fourth turning.

7:00The fourth turning, exactly. And his whole idea was that generations think about the world differently. And that leads me to the 68th generation.

7:09David McWilliams: So very briefly, listeners, in 1968, French students took to the streets in effect a revolution against President de Gaulle. And they saw de Gaulle as emblematic of the old guard. He had been fighting in the Second World War. He was absolutely a military man. He had led France in and out of the war in Algeria. And he was seen by those young students as very, very much yesterday's man. And what sparked it, though? Very little. It was a, I'm not too sure what actually sparked it, but it was a pretty big mass movement. And that prompted the expression, the 68ers in Europe. Yeah. And the 68ers in Europe was that generation, the generation before us, that came of age as late teenagers in 1968.

7:56So let's say they were born in 1950 or in the late 40s. So those people who were born straight after the Second World War and the baby boom of the Second World War, they were, particularly if you were German, they were unbelievably not just embarrassed by, but actually disliked their parents immensely because of what happened, because their parents were Nazis. Right. So the Germans were like, how could you do this? The French, on the other hand, the French youth became absolutely enthralled by decolonialism, by the anti-colonialist movement. And of course, what they saw in France was the Algerian War was the last and most profound, and for them, the most immoral example of white people colonizing brown people.

8:38Yes, yeah. It is also, just to get onto it, not just an economic and a cultural and a political, but it's a demographic war we're seeing in France between the boomers, what they call the 68ers, the 68ers, against the children of now, their grandchildren. So it's all into the mix. I mean, you could argue that, you know, what France needs to have is a sort of a generational purge

9:02David McWilliams: as to who gets all the goodies. because right now, France is, to misquote Cormac McCarthy, no country for young men. Remember the movie No Country for Old Men? France is a great country for an alfala because you have the best pensions, you retire early, you've got your house, you've probably got your second house in the south of France or somewhere in the countryside. You have been incredibly well pampered, you've always been well paid, you've a very good health system and life is good. Yes, it is. And the young men, the men who are rioting now, those guys and the men who are, and they are largely men, it's a country that's at very high levels of unemployment amongst the youth.

9:44Very little opportunity to get on the property ladder if that's your thing, even though it's not really a French thing, but you need somewhere to live.

9:50David McWilliams: And there is a sense that France and youthful France is not representative. And of course, where are they flocking to? Not the left, but the right. Yeah. But it's interesting, though, because the riots are all happening in urban areas and not in rural areas. And there's a different kind of vibe in rural areas. Where we go to is very rural. And what is also interesting is that because of property prices in the big urban areas, that a lot of the homeless are being shipped out into rural areas and into these small towns where there is loads of rundown properties and vacant houses and stuff. But if only you could engineer societies in that way, you could say, here's the vacant houses, here's the people.

10:37And of course, the last issue is race, right? And that's the big issue that a lot of the media will not talk about.

10:45David McWilliams: That in fact, lots of the kids doing the looting are Arab and black kids, North African in the main. And that of course is feeding to Le Pen because she's just saying, hold on a second, I told you, they were troublemakers. I told you they were the problem. Yeah, but it has to be said that in France, and there are pains to kind of stress this, that the riots have nothing to do with race. These particular riots have nothing to do with immigration. No, but the looting looks like it's been carried out by kids from non-French backgrounds. Okay. So basically I'm saying it is the poly crisis. This is what I'm talking about.

11:21So it's not just economic, it's not just culture, it's not just demography, it's not just the eclipse of the middle middle ground there's also race in there as well so this is why to use the French term it's a fucking head wreck okay yes yes that famous French phrase that famous French phrase you know vite alors c 'est un head wreck and of course Macron's sitting in the middle

11:42David McWilliams: he's a lame duck yeah he's only got a couple of months to go and meanwhile Madame Le Pen is thinking happy days for me yeah and just on Le Pen I was looking at some polling, and she is in around the 35 % mark. Mellichon, the next guy behind, is only 14%. So it looks like Le Pen and the elections are six months' time? They're in March or April. Yeah, I think it's the March or April. We'll come back to it sometime in the first half next year. So she is miles ahead. A French friend of mine said to me that he thinks there's a chance she might win in the first round. So the French elections, again, listener, if you're interested in this, the French elections were set up to basically be a two-horse race.

12:30So they always knew, I mean, you should watch, John, by the way, the first round of the French elections, because there's about 15 people in the studio trying to talk, right? Because there's millions of tiny parties. And an actor like Mélenchon, whose politics I don't like, but I love the individual. He's a really charismatic guy. He's about, I'd say, late 70s, maybe even early 80s. he's been around for years and years and years. The reason I know this is that years ago,

12:56David McWilliams: I was an economist on a team for France. It was a team based in London, but we used to have to go over to France all the time. And it was during the prime ministership of a guy called Ballador. Yes. And he was Jacques Chirac's last prime minister. And Jacques Chirac's called Mr. Three Minutes, John. Yeah, go on. To his sexual brevity. All right. He's quite efficient then, was he? Very efficient, right? Monsieur le Trois-Mitte. These are little gems you get in this podcast, right? But Ballador was the prime minister. And even then, so that's the late 90s, they tried some little small reform. We've talked about this in the podcast before.

13:37David McWilliams: And of course, all hell broke loose. But that's when Mélenchon first came into my worldview. And he was this kind of firebrand, radical, Trotskyite, you know, burn it down, take all the money. It was basically kind of eat the rich sort of stuff. Yeah, yeah. And he's still at it. But as you said, he's miles behind. But the way the French elections are set up is the following. The idea is that basically everyone's shouting and roars in the first round. Yeah. But the people who get the two most votes, they'll never get 50 % to win, but they might get 22 % won and the other might get 20%. They kind of run off against each other.

14:14And they will kind of be a left-wing and a right-wing person against each other. Probably centre-left, centre-right. So the idea is that at the beginning, everyone's shouting roars, and it's kind of free for all. Yeah. Left, centre-left, extreme left, blah, blah, blah. And they kind of coalesce around one left candidate who will usually be from the Socialist Party, okay? The party of Mitterrand, right? And likewise in the right. All the right will shout and roar, but eventually they will settle on a right wing, usually a Gaullist, a French nationalist. Right, right. old school French nationalist politician, and they'll fight it off against you.

14:50So they're safe in the assumption that they're kind of centre-left and kind of centre-right. So there's never a huge majority in Parliament. There's never a huge majority in the first round of the presidential election. And that's the way it was set up. Except there is now a chance

15:09David McWilliams: that Marine Le Pen will win the first round outright and there'll be no second round. Right, okay. Because the Gaullist parties are so weak. Yeah. The left is so divided. And she is so strong that people might just say, you know, just give her the vote because she's going to win anyway. And in that case, you have this unprecedented situation where Le Pen wins the first round. Nobody, even de Gaulle never won the first round. Yeah. Nobody's ever won the first round. Even Mitterrand, Chirac, Pompidou, all those big names from French past history. None of those guys, right? she might win in the first round given the political capital she's going to gain now from this and given the fact that the En Marche party which is Macron's party doesn't have a popular base because it's basically him and the fact that the left is as you've just pointed out splintered where even the most significant of the left has only got 14 % of the vote now that will change as the election nears and then people will begin to focus minds but I mean, she is miles ahead now.

16:15So what happens to French politics then and French standing? Because some of Le Pen's policies are kind of a bit, well, they're very extreme. Like for instance, she wants to defund the EU for a start. Very much so. She wants to do stuff like put an extra thousand euro ahead on any company that employs foreigners. Yeah, no, no, it's the real deal.

16:42David McWilliams: and she wants to deport immigrants. And all the other stuff that goes with it, like deportation. So let's, before we get there, let's talk about why now. Let's talk about the economics first, and then we'll talk about the politics. So the economics of the poly crisis, John, is since the war in Iran, diesel prices have gone up very rapidly, as to have petrol prices. In fact, I saw Michael O 'Leary say today, there was a very good bellwether, that he thinks airline prices will be up by 20 % next year. Yeah, yeah. By the way, Mike, the last time I was in France, which was during the summer, diesel prices were way over Irish diesel prices, which I found quite interesting.

17:24They tax diesel a lot. Yeah.

17:25David McWilliams: And of course, this goes back to the Gilets Jaunes was a incipient political movement triggered by a tax on fuel. The Gilets Jaunes said, it's all very well for you guys in Paris with your metros and your bicycles and your 15-minute cities, but we're driving around. So this is the reason the Gilets Jaunes put on the yellow vests and hung out on the roundabouts, was they were saying, we spend our time on roundabouts, right? You guys don't. So France, hypersensitive to fuel prices. Diesel prices have gone up. This hits them straight in their pocket, particularly if you're a Gilets Jaunes in the countryside.

18:06David McWilliams: Okay, that's the first thing. Second thing, bond prices have gone up dramatically. Bond yields, I mean. Now, what has happened is that France, we've done this before. In fact, dear listener, probably look back a couple of months, we did a big piece on the sustainability of the French budget deficit. The French bond yields have gone up. Now, it might not sound a lot. They've gone up from like about 3.4 % to 4.8%, but that's a 50 % increase in the cost of borrowing for the French state. And the French state has a debt GDP ratio of about 120%. Now, I don't happen to believe that France will go bust at all.

18:45I actually do believe that France will recalibrate itself at some stage. However, that, of course, bond, the increase in the yields and bonds drags up interest rates all over the place. And France is a highly indebted society, right? So if you've got a mortgage, if you've got a car loan, if you've got a house loan, if you've got, you know, basic stuff, right? They don't have student loans because this public sector is so big. But I mean, to give you a, it's a very Anglo-Saxon view,

19:14David McWilliams: but I'll give it to you nonetheless. French public spending as a percentage of GDP is 57 % of GDP. So 57 cents of every one euro that is spent in France, is spent by the state. Right, okay. Compared to, give us a comparison. 31 in Ireland. Oh. Right? So it's huge. Wow. I'll give you, but the fascinating thing was, it's 57 % of France now. It was never above 50 % in the Soviet Union. Right. So that shows you how big the state is. Yeah. Right? Upside of that is lots of things. Well, the Soviet Union, in fairness, weren't exactly looking after their people. They weren't looking after them. But it is funny, in a communist country, the state was spending less on GDP than the French are now.

19:59Anyway, what we've seen is an increase in diesel prices, increasing the long bond yield that leads to an increase in interest rates yeah all the while inflation and the cost of living is impacting again on particularly middle income people and lower middle income people they're the people who really feel the squeeze right so this is all

20:20David McWilliams: coming at one time so this is in a way the you could say the economics behind all this right And of course then the French are beginning to worry about AI and what's going to happen. And there's an anxiety about joblessness and what happens to the French middle and the French clerical class who are the most clerical of all clerical classes. So the French clerical class is classically clerical, right? They have lots of jobs worth and they don't go beyond their boundaries and all that sort of stuff. But anyway, my point is, those guys who did extremely well in the 1970s and the 1980s, and they had big French state salaries, and everything was subsidized, they are now the people who are benefiting from the extraordinary open-ended pensions the French state gave.

21:12Right, right, yeah, yeah. And who's paid for them is the dwindling amount of young people.

21:18David McWilliams: and those young people are also being hit by all these cost of living problems at the same time. And if they have a job, their rates of taxation are exorbitant. So what you're seeing is this also, not just a demographic crisis, but a crisis of almost a population pyramid. So the population pyramid should look like a Christmas tree. Loads of babbies, fewer old people. That's what it should look like. It's a thing that everyone kind of recognizes if they see it. Nobody has to have done statistics to see this. That's very much of developing countries, isn't it? Like a massive base of young people and a tiny, tiny old people point.

21:59So if you have very generous pensions, you need to have a population pyramid that looks like that. So basically, in effect, young people coming in at the bottom pay for old people.

22:10David McWilliams: But because there's many much more, young people at the bottom, the old people don't really overburden you. But what you've seen now since the 1960s and 70s into the 80s is that population pyramid has really changed. So the base is now increasingly looking smaller than the top. So the base are the people who are paying and the top are people who are receiving. And ultimately, what you get is younger people paying for older people. I'll just give you an example because it's really important. In 1968, when these guys decided that they were going to change the way the world ran, the boomers, and they subsequently lined their pockets, right?

22:52David McWilliams: But only 12 % of French people were over 65. Right, okay. In 2012, the figure had only risen to about 17%. It's now 25%. Wow. So it's rapidly, rapidly getting old and getting older still. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right? And people are living longer and all that kind of stuff. So that huge pressure, that population pressure is collapsing upon the young, right, at the very time that they can't get a gig. Yeah. So this is another factor. So it's this top-heavy kind of model. But, you know, it was interesting as well, speaking to people in France when I'm there, you know, one guy was trying to describe, I think I might have mentioned this to you before, the kind of tax system.

23:31It was mind-boggling how complicated it is. You know, different sectors have different tax bands and all that kind of stuff. So the upshot of that is there's a huge amount of economics and trade going on that's all under the table. It's all cash-driven. Yeah, no, I would say particularly in rural France. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. So the government are missing out in possibly billions. They probably are, but they're also grabbing whatever they can get. And this is also part of the problem.

24:03David McWilliams: And this is bleeding into perceptions of democracy, John. This is the interesting thing, right? that 68 % of French people in the last poll believed that democracy was not delivering. Yeah. Democracy as a concept. As a concept, yeah. Like liberal democracy, which promised wages and a decent amount of prosperity for everybody. That was the promise of liberal democracy, is not actually delivering. So that is allowing them to say, well, if liberal democracy isn't delivering, I mean, why don't we go to this illiberal Democrat, Le Pen or Mellon Shopper, particularly Le Pen in this case, right? And they're kind of saying, well, look, it's not that she has dragged us into her net and we're completely convinced by all her policies, as you've just articulated, but we've been pushed towards her by the fact that the centre has actually failed to deliver for us.

25:00David McWilliams: And when they look back, they will look back at Macron, they will look back all the way basically back to Jack Chirac in the late 90s and what they will look is a series of ineffectual presidents who promised the earth and you know one of them ended up in prison Sarkozy you know yes I forgot about him actually ah Nicolas Nicolas le petit mec is he still in prison no he's out he married the model the super model Carlo Bruni Carlo Bruni Italian super model yeah so that's going on that economic idea. And then what is also going on is the gradual reduction of the status of the manufacturing male, which is something that's gone on everywhere.

25:48David McWilliams: But the man who works in a factory is a skilled technician of some sort, earns a good wage. That wage is sufficient for him to keep a family of three kids in a reasonable flat. He's a member of a trade union. He's probably a member of the Labour Party or the Socialist Party. So all that sort of collectivist politics that was very much defined the 68th generation, that is all atrophied as France and the rest of Europe has been hit by various, in effect, Chinese shocks to manufacturing. And so this is, you could argue, this is why the German centre-left, the German Social Democratic Party, which was bolstered by, let's say, your typical Volkswagen worker, who basically voted left, was a member of a trade union, the IG Metall trade union usually in Germany, probably went to see a football match every week, was a member of sort of community things.

26:48Yeah, yeah. That's all atrophying, disappearing, fraying around the edges, and those people are looking for a home, a political home as well as a cultural home. Yeah. And probably the same in Italy as well. Exactly the same. I mean, the extraordinary thing about Italy is Maloney is being threatened from the right. Yeah. So Maloney was regarded two years ago as the right wing of right wing of right wing people. Now the threat to her isn't from the left. It's from somebody further right than her who believes she hasn't been tough enough on immigration and hasn't been Italian enough. Right. So what you're seeing is a dynamic

27:24David McWilliams: where even those people that might have tried to migrate from the right to the centre are being dragged back by extreme people on the more extreme right. And of course, if you're not in power, John, there's the great expression that power is a straitjacket. Yeah. If you're not in power, you can say whatever the hell you like. Yes, of course. Do you know what I mean? So you can say, well, I want to deport all Africans tomorrow morning. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then suddenly the person in power has to kind of react to that. So in the old days, before mobile phones and before the proliferation, and this is your point about Bannon, the proliferation of various channels, messages were conceived, birthed, and constructed in the center.

28:12David McWilliams: And typically the center dragged the extremes into the center in what they would call a big tent, right? That's what they would describe the Tory party in the UK before the advent of Farage. that the Tory party, within the Tory big tent, you have all sorts of crazy racists over here, right? Yeah, yeah. And mad libertarian, you know, but they were kind of gelded by the fact that the Tory party was ultimately a centrist right party. That's when the centre had good, workable ideas. Yes. Now they've run out of those ideas. Now they're not working anymore. It's not, yeah, they're not working anymore.

28:49David McWilliams: So we have three big ideas, right? We have three big problems going on. The first is those people who feel, that we just spoke about, that they are now, they used to be on the inside, like their parents were on the inside, but they're now on the outside. They don't have a stake. But the thing about democracies, they might not have a stake, but they have a vote. Yeah. And so every time they vote, they vote for the person who says, I feel your pain, you're on the outside. In fact, to a degree, just to Irish eyes the whole thing, these left behinds are most evident in northern ireland because i was up there on my believe it i went from innish man to belfast the other day right don't ask great road trip it was a family yeah it was a good road trip but it was a it was a family do but uh and i was in east belfast and you know you look at loyalist east belfast yeah and it's very poor it's really left behind it kind of fetishizes the past you know when we made the titanic sort of stuff yeah yeah and those people are very much now the outsiders i think because all they have is a nostalgia for the past they don't have anything to look forward to i mean you could argue and i've argued this in the north a lot nationalists have a better mood music yeah they're going somewhere like nationalists in the north are chucky our law our day will come we're doing better we're doing better than our parents we're doing much better than our grandparents we're gradually ascending the heights that used to be owned by the unionists whereas the people who've really fallen down are the loyalists working class yeah who used to be those guys who had manufacturing jobs they had the job in the ship works they had the orange order they'd go to yeah they'd watch linfield and rangers they were trade union members and all those things so they're all gone so i think if you want to think Listener, if you want to think from the Irish perspective of a classic left-behind subgroup, I think loyalists in the North probably accord to that more than anybody else.

30:47So you have that, right?

30:49David McWilliams: Those outsiders. Then, of course, you have what we've spoken about before is how after the crisis of 2008, using interest rates as the global policy to get the economy running again was a policy that was basically called improving the balance sheet. So after 2008, house prices fell, asset prices fell, all that. So the idea is how do you rebalance the balance sheet, but broadly of the upper middle classes, in the middle classes? We cut interest rates, then it means the people who have assets do very well. What this does is it refloats the economy, but it refloats it in a way that's completely and utterly biased towards or jaundiced towards our favouring people who own assets.

31:39Same thing happened in France. So what you get is this cleavage of inequality. So not only are the people who used to be in the manufacturing jobs feeling pissed off on the outside, they see other parts of the society doing very well, thank you very much. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And they can't understand because those guys aren't working harder than them. In fact, they seem to be working less than them. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

32:02David McWilliams: And so in order to stand still, these fellows have to run harder and harder and harder. And then you have, you drop on top of that, the basic, the fear of AI, the fear of the future, what they hear in the news and that AI is destroying jobs, but we must embrace it because if we don't embrace it, the American, you know, all that sort of stuff. And then finally, and this is the tip that pushed them over, is the state's ability of late to provide decent infrastructure. Yeah, yeah. So roads, railways, decent schools. Schools in France. In this particular instance. So that's the idea that on top of all this anxiety.

32:43Yeah.

32:44David McWilliams: It's like, okay, well, all this shit's going on, but at least my taxes are going to give my kids a proper school. Proper teachers. a proper building, some facilities, a football pitch or a running track or whatever. What are they up to? And not leaky roofs, Mac. John, it's not only leaky roofs. Half of French schools, half of them are missing at least one teacher. They can't employ teachers, right? Amazingly, 7.5 % of French schools lost hours last year of teaching because they don't have teachers. So what you're seeing is, of course, the reason the kids were going on strike and they were fed up was that they were kind of sitting out.

33:28And after a while, as you know, in school, there's nothing better than sitting out if you're swatting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right, because you need a break. But if you're sitting out all the time, you can sense your education is slipping away. Absolutely. So again, it's again, it's the basic provision of public infrastructure. It's also, that could have been or used to be the promise of government. And now that has not been delivered on either. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it was quite interesting when we spoke to Yan Mei about China, and she was saying that her parents felt proud to be Chinese because the state was delivering the metros and the clean parks.

34:02And so they think, okay, well, all that suffering that we've gone through is now worth it because we have good public infrastructure. And France used to have that. Yes, they did. Absolutely. The TGV and all that kind of stuff. But let me ask you then, this is not, I mean, it's kicking off in France mostly at the moment. But it's, as you said at the very beginning, it's spreading to Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal. Spain's got an election in November. Yeah. But also, you know, it will soon probably visit these shores as well. But can I ask you then, is this or could this be the end of the European project?

34:40But before you answer that, let's do a bit of this. Let's take a bit of European money.

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37:21So Mike, we're talking about France in particular, because it's really kicking off in France. But these riots and this civil unrest is spreading across Europe, in Germany, in Italy, Spain, and Portugal, and all the rest. And soon enough, we'll probably come to these shores. But does that mean, could this be the end of the European project? Well, if you're a reader of The Daily Telegraph, you hope that this is the end of The Daily Telegraph.

37:49David McWilliams: But I always find the barometers of this, it's always very interesting to read the British nationalist press, because every time there's a crisis in France, they herald, this is it! We were right all the time, Brexit was right, Look, I think what we're looking at is a synchronized political crisis. But it's a crisis at this stage of legitimacy of the center right and center left, the established governing parties. They are not offering a story. Because most politics is about storytelling. They're not offering a story that makes sense to enough people. Well, it's division, isn't it? Yeah. Where are we headed?

38:31Where are we going? There. We're going ahead. Yeah, okay, Grant, yeah, let's go that way, right?

38:36David McWilliams: And that's the first thing. The second thing is part of that demographic dilemma, the boomers versus the Gen X, what are they? Gen Zs, right? But as well as their political parties not being legitimate, their political ideas don't have the same purchase. Yeah. And one of the great political ideas of the boomers and their parents was European integration. Because these are people who, as we said, they came of age in the 1960s. They were born, therefore, just after the Second World War. Their entire familial and national framework was the Second World War. As that Second World War recedes and the very last of the, I mean, the very few soldiers left from the Second World War, very few people who lived through it are left.

39:32David McWilliams: You know, you have to be, you know, in your 90s. Yeah. As their collective memory recedes into nostalgia, let's say, the ideas that they kept very close to their heart are not that relevant. So it's hard to explain to, let's say, a young French person or German or Italian or whatever it is, you know, unless we keep Brussels together, there is a chance that there will be a war in Europe. And people say, no, there won't be. And so the very elemental nature of the European Union was that there is within Europe an unstable chemistry. And that unstable chemistry involves nationalism. And look what happened in the Second World War.

40:21As that recedes, the enemy is no longer Germany or nationalism or military. The enemy is the people beside them. It's the people inside the country. And of course, Le Pen has understood that the European idea is always everywhere an idea of the elites. People who went to swanky colleges like the College of Europe, like the person you're looking at. I was going to say, you're self-included. No, but you know what I mean? Those projects, they're the project of the graduates from university. Your average person is like, whatever. I mean, Irish people really quite like the European Union, but I think Ireland's a wee bit of an outlier in this.

41:07I think that we know that support from the European Union is falling,

41:12David McWilliams: not collapsing, but it's falling. Yeah. And we know that for Le Pen, this is a vote winner. because she can say to French farmers, look, if it wasn't for this, that, and the other, even though they've done very well, we would grow more vines or we would grow this, that. They won't be growing more vines, let me tell you. But she can say that. She can tell them. Look, it's all these things being imposed on us by those people over there. It's going to be us and them. We'll other the problem over there. And Maloney did that. But if you are a European Federalist, your days are very much numbered. if you are a European integrationist which is quite different and you believe in the project, the projet right, I think that Maloney offers you some sucker in a way because Maloney, like Le Pen said, we are going to turn our backs in the European Union and blah blah blah blah and she must have listened to people in Italy and said, hold on a second we can't do that, they pay a lot of money into southern Italy our markets are all European, we are a European country.

42:22David McWilliams: In fact, Europe without Italy is nothing. You can't have the European Union without Rome. Rome is the cradle of European civilization. Argument, Athens and Rome. You know, you can't have it. It's too symbolic. Likewise, France. But I mean, if I were sitting in Brussels, I would be very worried about the rhetoric of all the nationalist parties because all of them bar none have said and another problem is yeah the european union look i'd be most worried if i were an illegal migrant in france in the sense of what might happen to me the day after a le pen victory absolutely yeah down the pecking order of worry would i have the well-heeled public servant in brussels who's worried about their pension but But it's very clear that since Jacques Delors, which is a long time ago now in France, there hasn't been a French uber-federalist as prime minister or any position of power.

43:24David McWilliams: And that goes for Germany too. I mean, if you've heard Vidal talk about the European Union, she's absolutely scathing about it. And you contrast that with, you know, Oscar Lafontaine and Helmut Kohl and Angela Merkel. they were all really committed to the project. But they were of that 68 generation, weren't they? Angelo was 68 and Helmut Kohl lived through the Second World War. So if you think about La Fontaine, probably lived through the Second World War as well. Mertz did not, but is definitely a 68er. And probably defined himself against the 68ers, but in the same framework as the 68ers. And Pedro Sanchez in Spain, who's called a snap election.

44:07Yeah.

44:07David McWilliams: He's called the snap election. That'll be very close. That'll be very, very, very close. So what we're seeing, John, we'll probably conclude here, is a polycrisis or an omnicrisis at the heart of Europe. Let's not forget that France tends to conceive the big ideas. These are the people that gave you the Soissons and Wheaters, the 68ers. But even before that, they gave you the French Revolution. These are the people who gave you the guillotine. They gave you equality, fraternity, all that good stuff. Liberté. They gave you decimalisation. I think we've talked about that before. They gave you the idea of democracy.

44:45David McWilliams: It was France that deposed the king. It was France that was against the on-scene regime. It was France that actually was against monarchies. France was the symbol of modernism of the world in the 19th century. And it always has been an incredibly important country. maybe not as important as A, it thinks it is, and B, it used to be, but it's still an important country. But as you said at the top, this is sort of a synchronized thing. It's economic, it's demographic in terms of either internal demographics between the boomers and the Gen Zers. It's demographic in terms of the population pyramid.

45:26David McWilliams: It's political in terms of the eclipse of the center and the rise of the extreme right and left. And of course, it's economic in terms of Europe's ability to generate the prosperity that generates the status quo, that generates the passivity, that generates calm. And so therefore, the events of last week, John, and possibly this week and maybe into next week, feel to me much less like a blip and much more like a turning point. And the direction of travel is very obvious. And it's very different from the direction of travel that was the case 20 or 30 years ago. Of course, the other correlation between 68 and now is that the consumption of red wine has dropped by nearly 90 % in France alone.

46:11Just saying, Zoll.

46:12David McWilliams: No, no, no. But that, John, poses a challenge much greater than the demography, the economics, the sociology, even, dare I say, the psychology of the nation. God, they're gone. They can't come back from that. Not a chance. Not a chance. We'll talk to you on Thursday. By the way, if you want to get this podcast early and with no ads, join us on Patreon. That's patreon.com forward slash David McWilliams and join the gang.

47:12We'll see you next time. It all. You can manage orders, sync inventory, track returns, all automatically. Everything your operation needs, all in one place. Upgrade your shipping operations to stress-proof your biggest sales days and capture every bit of potential revenue. Go to ShipStation.com and use code audio and get 30 days free. The youth mental health crisis is growing, and social media is a major driver. Kids are spending up to nine hours a day on screens, often unsupervised, and studies show a direct link to anxiety, depression, and even suicidal thoughts. That's where Gab comes in. Gab offers safer phones and watches for kids with no social media, tailored to every age, offering the right tech at the right time, or tech in steps.

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