Mbappé vs Le Pen: The Battle for France

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0:59David McWilliams: To understand the economy, you have to understand human nature. This podcast is powered by Acast.

1:21Bonjour tout le monde. Aujourd 'hui, on parle sur France. We're going to talk about France, the French economy, the French society, what is ahead for France,

1:34David McWilliams: why what happens in France tends to lead Europe or has done ever since the anniversary that France is celebrating today, which is the 14th of July. The 14th of July is, we know, Independence Day in France, the storming of the Bastille, which was stormed in 1789, kicking off the French Revolution. The French Revolution being probably the most seminal event in European politics and economics over the last three or 400 years. So that's what we're going to talk about. And of course, it's all against the background of the electrifying performances from the French national football team who have gone out of their way to impress.

2:15Yeah, I mean, they seem unstoppable at this stage. Mbappe, Dembele, Ulisse is just phenomenal. They're unstoppable. The guy who was born in West London. Yes. It's an amazing story. Play for Chris Apalos. So basically, we're at the business end of the World Cup, as everybody knows. We are down to the final two major games, semifinals and finals. But something else is going on in France, which is another ticking clock. and it's the clock that's ticking down to the French presidential election next year. Now, typically in French presidential elections, there's lots of shatman roaring, and at the end, because the system is constructed in such a way, I'll explain in a minute, the French tend to coalesce around a centrist person, either centre-left or centre-right.

3:06This time, there is a real fear on the centre and a real enthusiasm on the right that Marine Le Pen, who is now going for her third time as the presidential candidate of what used to be called the National Front. It's now called the National Rally. And there is a sense that she has got the momentum behind her. If that were to happen, if this were to happen, France would be a profoundly different country from the France that we have known, we have loved, we have envied, we have been jealous of for many, many years. So that's really the podcast. It's not necessarily that today's Independence Day, John, is interesting.

3:48It's actually that we are in the clutches of what looks to be a vicious, vicious political campaign. Marine Le Pen will be wearing an ankle tag, which is another strange detail. Yes, indeed. I mean, yes, her ban for running for election was lifted only last week, I think, wasn't it? Yeah, it was last week. But her momentum has been building over the last two elections. So she's been getting closer and closer. I know you say they always end up going for a centrist, but this time she could actually get over the line. I think she could get over the line. I also think we shouldn't rule out a sixth republic.

4:31So the French are on their fifth republic, John. They're on their fifth republic since the Bastille Day. They have changed maybe once every two generations. They change. They have a big kerfuffle and they change the way the world works and the French world works. The Fifth Republic is characterized, just so we know, by an unbelievably powerful president. And so it was instituted, a bit of background, in the 1950s after the Algerian or maybe during the Algerian War. And what it was, was there was a sense that the Fourth Republic was far too democratic in a way, that the parliament couldn't make decisions, there were too many coalitions, France was paralysed.

5:15And of course, de Gaulle was in retirement, and he was urged to come out of retirement. And de Gaulle said, I will come out of retirement, but I want to have the major hand in changing the constitution. And he changed the constitution in order to give the president, who would be him, a huge, significant power over almost every aspect of French society, but particularly foreign policy, which the French take extremely seriously. Can I ask you, though, every time they have a new republic as such, you're essentially saying they have a new constitution. Yes, and they vote on it. But do they rip up the old constitution, or are they just a little amendments, a little tweak here and there?

6:01No, the French never really tweak. They go all in and they take the constitution and they say, look, 80 % of it says working, that's fine, but we're not going to actually change the constitution for small Mickey Mouse changes. We're actually going to do substantial changes. So they changed the structure. I mean, it's again, it's a very French way of doing things. They sit around and they say, okay, this is not working. And they start again. Now, the dilemma for France is the following. Is that when you go to France, as you know, John, French people have an amazing capacity to complain. Amazing.

6:34And a French friend of mine said, French people live in paradise, but have managed to convince themselves they live in hell. Right? This was he was saying that the weather, the food, the welfare state, the efficient transport, the efficient health system. We go through some of the figures. There is a reason that France is the most visited country in the world, bar none. It is the world's number one tourist destination because it's absolutely beautiful. It's an amazing country.

6:59David McWilliams: But the French have convinced themselves that they are living in some sort of hellhole. And as a result of that, the politics is very, very fractious. and they've had the gilet jaune in the last, let's say, 10 years. They now have a president that everybody seems to hate, Macron, even though he seems to be a very clever man and a very, very brilliant man in many ways. But lots of people hate him. They have extreme rights. They've also extreme left in the guise of Mélenchon. We'll talk about him in a minute when we talk about the runners and riders in the presidential election. But just to give everyone a snapshot, right?

7:34France, population, close to 70 million. It's the seventh largest economy in the globe. It's the second largest in the EU. It is a massive, massive country. Its real GDP per capita in and around$50 ,000 to$52 ,000 per head. The growth rate quite slow, about 0.9%, right? And that's a problem. And its deaths are quite significant, which we will come back to.

8:00David McWilliams: But in terms of its overall GDP, it has a GDP of 3.1 trillion. That's roughly about 3 % of the entire global economy. So France is a massive player. Its death GDP ratio has reached 113%. And the deficit they're running is 5.8 % of GDP, which is well above the EU's limits and well above similar countries. And now, and this is important, John, French borrowing costs are higher than Italians for the first time in many, many years. Italy was always seen as the sort of a benchmark for fiscal delinquency, in fact, which was never really the case. The Italians have been running what's called a primary surplus since the 90s.

8:42They've actually been running a Crenary tight ship. The French have not.

8:45David McWilliams: And as a result of that, there are concerns over the trajectory of French deficits and the French debt. And of course, the problem for France is that it is so fractious and that it is so divided that the country has become slightly ungovernable. Now, this is the dilemma, right? That it just is drifting along. You know, this is all summed up, you know, about France. Charles Legault, the famous, famous general, once quipped about governing France and how hard it was to govern. He said, how can you govern a country that has 246 varieties of cheese? And I think that's absolutely spot on, right? And not to mention the wine as well, you know?

9:27Exactly. But again, let's look. French unemployment is about 7.5%, but youth unemployment is very high. They're about 16%, moving towards 20%.

9:36David McWilliams: Of course, the big issue in France is that nobody wants to work very long, right? What they all want to do is retire early. Now, I must admit, I think that this is a very civilized way to live, if you can live this, if you can afford to live this way. To have people retiring. And the argument was made to me very, very brilliantly a couple of years ago for the French wanting to retire early in their early 60s, at 60, right? And this guy said, well, you know, what is fascinating in France is that your 60s are probably your last good decade before things start to get unhealthy. That's true. And he made the point to me, he said, look, why should we impose on people in the last good decade the obligation to go to work.

10:28And I thought it was actually, I hadn't thought of it. I thought that's actually just because, you know, by the time you get to 70s, things start going wrong. So I thought it was actually... It's the old sniper alley thing, isn't it, that we've often spoken about before. You know, if something's going to go wrong with you, it's sometime between your 50s and your 60s. And if you make it to 60, you know, that's probably the last good decade. But in previous years, they could afford, to retire at 60. So it became kind of ingrained in the culture. Very much so. Very, very much so. And that's, of course, so basically what's going on in France is very large deficits, the result of a very, very generous welfare state.

11:07Part of that story is the retirement story. Also a very high levels of personal taxation and probably reaching the limits of higher taxation. the French have the highest percentage of government involvement in the economy in Europe. So they can't really tax anymore. So they've kind of, on the economic side, what you have is a country that's sort of maxed out. And therefore they have to take these hard decisions. And these hard decisions that people don't want to take. And leaders in France have, for a long, long time,

11:43David McWilliams: sort of fiddled around the edges, and I'm talking the last 20 or 30 years. and now you have a situation where the system is actually reaching capacity. And that, I think, is the background noise for the election, but the major issue for the right wing is immigration, which we'll talk about in a second. So when you talk about the possibility of a sixth republic, that's kind of like hitting the reset button. Is that what you mean? Exactly. I think this is coming for France. I think it is a sort of a day of reckoning for the French. I think that the system that de Gaulle created, the system that they built after the Second World War, the system that got them through what they call the 30 glorious years from 1945 to, let's say, the late 1970s, that system has been, in the last 40 years, has begun to show signs of atrophying, which might explain why you have the Gilets Jean, which was really a reaction to a small increase in petrol taxes.

12:43But it just triggered people so much simply because the people in what they call France Profonde, you know, basically outside Paris, they really believed that the elite in Paris in the 16th, the 16th arrondissement, had no idea of just how pinned to the collar most French people are. And that little increase in petrol tax tipped them over. And of course, that was the reason the Gilets Jean occupied roundabouts, John. Because they basically said, we are the people who drive because we don't have the fancy trains and we don't have the metros

13:16David McWilliams: and we don't have the fancy schools that you guys have and we don't have the bike lanes you have. We drive everywhere and you increase that part of our weekly shop, i.e. our fuel bill, and we'll tip over. Yeah, not only the Gilets Jaunes, but down in the area of France that I go to, the Corbier region and Qatar country, as they call it, the farmers, they're having a tough time as well, and the wine growers. But in their small kind of protests, if you drive into any town, they've taken the names of the town and turned it upside down. Oh, really? That's their symbolic? Yeah, it's just symbolic, exactly.

13:55Well, these are the good details. These are the visual tropes of podcasting. But, John, you mentioned agriculture. France is Europe's largest agriculture producer, right? It produces nearly 90 billion euros of agricultural output every year,

14:08David McWilliams: representing about 20 % of the EU's total agricultural production. So it is a massive, massive agricultural country with a huge, as you say, farming lobby. Yeah. It is also Europe's leading nuclear country. Nuclear accounts for 67.3 % of all France's electric production, which is the highest share of any country in the world. it. And of course, I mentioned tourism, you know, 100 million people visit France every year, which is phenomenal. That's incredible. Phenomenal. And of course, as we know, the French are very good at making luxury goods, they're making handbags, LVMH, which is the world's largest luxury conglomerate, that has been going gangbusters for the French, you know, Hermes, L 'Oreal, all that sort of thing.

14:55It also makes Airbuses. So, you know, it's got a huge amount of industrial heft. And it's also, and this is something I think people don't realise, is that France inadvertently or explicitly made a massive bet on inequality, on the inequality that's going on in the world, on the fact that it made a massive bet on the top 1 % or the top 5%. What do you mean? Because it involves itself in luxury goods. So without the emergence

15:24David McWilliams: of a massive middle class in China, without the emergence of huge inequalities in the United States, without the emergence of this luxury class at the very, very top of our society, France wouldn't be half as well off. It's a certain thing if you say to French people, they say, well, they don't like that because they'd like to be socialist or whatever. But if you actually think of their economy, it's a better than 1%. Yeah, yeah. And that's interesting because most French economists are very, very left-wing. There's, you know, Gabriel Zucman is an economist that people might have on the podcast heard of and Thomas Piketty, and they're all for tax the wretch and all that sort of stuff.

16:02David McWilliams: But the actuality is that France has made a significant bet on inequality and has paid off for it. You know, selling posh wine, posh cheeses, posh handbags, all that sort of stuff. Well, it's interesting you mention posh wine because, you know, I've been doing a lot of reading and drinking, of course, of course. But in the whole wine industry, and the French wine industry is in big trouble. In fact, the global wine industry is in big trouble. But France in particular, particularly those big Bordeauxs, for the first time, they've been overtaken by American wine as being the top wine in the world, which is a real kicking the teeth for them.

16:42Yes, because they always looked down on American wine, didn't they? Exactly, exactly. But there's an overproduction of wine and dramatically falling wine sales, particularly red wine. So the government are now paying a lot of the wine growers, the grape growers, up to about six grand per hectare to rip up the vines. It's incredible. Wow. Wow. Well, so what you're looking at is a society that is quite fractured, and that is reflective in politics. You look at a society that hasn't really recovered from the 2008 crash in any robust way. The economy hasn't really. It's also been a society characterized by terrorist attacks.

17:17These are the sort of things that we forget about. You know, the Charlie Hebdo and all those, and the Bata plan and these sort of things.

17:24David McWilliams: So that has heightened racial and inter-religious tension. There has been a general sense of a failure of both the right wing, the centre-right, and the centre-left to actually bring about the change that France needs to push the economy forward. There is a sense that En Marche, which is Macron's party, is simply a centrist party cutting and pasting bits of centrist policies from all over the world. It's run out of steam. It's run out of rope. The fact that the party was set up by Macron himself means that it doesn't really have an essential network of grassroots volunteers and players, right?

18:03Yeah.

18:03David McWilliams: That's why they used to call Macron the Jupiterian president, right? He actually decides that he's Jupiter, the head of the gods, right? In contrast, the left wing and the right wing have been cultivating grassroots members, local towns, councillors, all that thing, for a long, long time. So there is a sense, John, that there's a big vacuum in France and that could go either way. So this election that's coming up next year is not only crucial for France, but it's also crucial for Europe and the future of Europe. Absolutely. I mean, look, if you go back to the French Revolution, even if you go back further than that, right, to the French monarchs and the monarchies.

18:46If you go back, you know, all the way to Agincourt, and then what is basically, France has, by virtue of its size and its power, has consistently, consistently pushed Europe in certain directions. The most obvious one, of course, being the French Revolution, because the French Revolution and the French Enlightenment

19:09David McWilliams: have really set the tone for subsequent social movements in the whole of Europe. The First and Second World War, of course, France was central to those wars in the sense that the First World War was largely fought in France on the Western Front. And of course, the Nazi occupation of France and the subsequent emergence of Vichy France really, really affected French prestige, French pride. The sense of France being a big country, which is why once they got back into the game, they were so insistent on being part of the UN Security Council, having a nuclear bomb, all that sort of thing. And of course, the French have, in the last 50 years, lost their empire.

19:52David McWilliams: And their empire was a huge source of pride for many French people and prestige. Other people thought it was an abomination. But many French people thought, you know, that's where we are. We're a big, proper, boss country. And as we've spoken about before, they were also the driving force behind introducing the Euro. Well, completely. And not just the Euro, but the absolute driving force behind the European Union. So if you go back to 1957, which is the Treaty of Rome, which is signed in Rome, but it's basically a coal and steel arrangement between Germany and France. The entire axis of the European Union has been based on what was called the Bon Paris axis.

20:35David McWilliams: and then it's the Berlin-Paris axis. So basically, the European Union and all its various projects and its expansions, etc., has been largely a French-driven program. And the fascinating thing for Le Pen is that one of her explicit policies is to distance France from the European Union, to distance France from Brussels, not to cut off and to break away or any of that sort of stuff, no, that Brexit-y stuff, but to impose limits and boundaries on the European Union's involvement in the French economy. And, of course, that is a disaster for European federalists because without France, nothing happens.

21:20David McWilliams: And it's also the sort of the political virus that is spreading all around Europe now sees the European Union as part of the problem, not part of the solution, and it was part of the solution for so long. So you have lots of stuff in the mix. Okay, Mac, so 2027 is the big year. We're all heading towards that for the election. So who are the runners and riders in this upcoming election? But before you answer that, let's have a little glass of vino. Absolutely. Good morning.

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23:25Okay, Mac, April 2027 is the big French election. Yeah. We have the Macrons, we have the Marine Le Pens, but who are the runners and riders that we should be looking out for? Okay, so we're going to give you the top four, right? Marine Le Pen national rally is currently on 36 % in the polls. So she's miles ahead of everybody else, miles, miles ahead. Then we have a guy called Edouard Philippe, who is from a party called Horizons. He's a 19%. He's Macron's former prime minister. He's the current mayor of La Havre. And he's everybody's favorite to beat the Front National candidate if he gets to it.

24:11So I'll tell you all about how that all works, right? He's a centrist. He's pro-business. You know, he favors reforms like reducing corporation tax, giving companies more power over employees. You know, he's basically central right, pro-European. And since stepping down as PM in 2020, he's created this new bloc within French politics. So that's him. He's the sort of guy who would be the new Macron. Okay, but he's only on 19 % of the vote at the moment. Then you have a firebrand teaser, John,

24:40David McWilliams: called Jean-Luc Mélenchon. and Melenchamp is a very, very far left rabble rouser. He leads his own party. They are very, very much part of the old left tradition. They want to support the French withdrawal from NATO. You know, all sorts of things like that. Really? Wow. He would basically jack up taxes and rack up spending and probably have a second look at the euro if he were to get in. And, you know, again, the interesting thing is he's on 15 % of the vote and that's a hard vote. that's a proper base he has. And would most of those be the Gilets Jean? Gilets Jean, lots of those people. I know there's a fascinating thing going on in the moment, I'll tell you in a moment.

25:20And then there's a soft left character

25:22David McWilliams: called Raphael Glucksmann, and he would be kind of centre-left. He's an MEP. He's the co-president of a centre-left party. He's probably a typical old sort of socialist, a European socialist, right? And of course, he's an environmentalist, etc. You say that as if it's a bad thing. No, but I mean, it's from that. No, I'm joking. He's from that world, okay? But the thing is that the French presidential election is set up in order for the centrists to win, and I'll explain why. What they have is they have the first round. The first round of election, basically, you know, Le Pen might get 30 % or maybe even more, maybe 35%.

26:03David McWilliams: You know, somebody else, let's say, for example, Philippe might get 20%. There's going to be about 16 candidates in the first round. So it's a political clusterfuck, right? And the best thing to do, John, the best crack in France is to watch the French presidential debate because there's hundreds of characters in the first round and they're all shouting and roaring in there. And in fact, in the last presidential debate, I went to Le Pen's final rally. Ah, I remember that. Yeah, in 20... In Marseille, wasn't it? In Marseille. I can't remember what date it was. And that was extraordinary. It was in the Hippodrome in Marseille.

26:40David McWilliams: It was a rally like no other because Marseille is such a racial hotbed and there's so many racial problems down there. And of course, Marseille is the home of the Pien Noir. Blackfoot. Yeah. People like Albert Camus. And they were a million French settlers, in effect, who had settled in Algeria. And when the Algerian War was won by the Algerians and lost by the French, those Pierre Noir came to France and they have very, very conservative views in the main, very traditionalists, very much the backbone of the national rally in Marseille. So going to that was quite interesting for me because it gives you a sense of the theatre and the drama and the fact that Le Pen herself is a good speaker.

27:23She's got quite interesting body language. She's very relaxed. She's very good with people. She's very, very good at kind of glad handling. She's a proper populist politician, you know? in a way her father wasn't. Because her father was a populist politician, who had a little problem of being very close to Nazis. Yes, being a Nazi is a bit of a problem, all right. He said the Holocaust was just a statistical detail of the Second World War.

27:48David McWilliams: Now, another fascinating thing, John, is it's a very, very good barometer of what's happening in France. Traditionally, Jewish votes in France, and it's also Europe's largest Jewish community and largest Arab community. So it is an explosive place, right? Yeah, tinderbox. But traditionally, French Jews always voted for the left-wing candidate or the central candidate. They could never vote for the right wing because the right wing were anti-Semites. Now French Jews are voting in significant numbers for the extreme right, who used to be anti-Semite, because actually they think that only the extreme right can protect France from Islamification.

28:30and Islamification is exactly what Le Pen dog whistles all the time. That's her big issue.

28:39David McWilliams: And Le Pen has said the very first thing they will do is they will have a referendum on immigration, on the number of migrants in France, but also on the deportation of people from France who were there illegally, who got criminal records, all that sort of stuff, right? It's real Trump talk. Well, what she's basically saying is that this is the issue of the day. And if you look poll after poll after poll of French people, French people overwhelmingly support caps on immigration. But no party has been brave enough or bold enough to say, okay, we're going to make this our central message. And Le Pen realizes, A, it's a vote winner, but B, it's where France wants to be taken.

29:25David McWilliams: And France wants to be taken, she believes, by her. But how practical is that? You know, in the real world, you could vote all you like and, yeah, let's get rid of all these Africans and Arabs and blah, blah, blah. But there's already a very significant part of the population that are non-white, for want of a better word. Well, this is where we were. So we're going rapidly now to the football team, the role of the football team in the French consciousness, right? Number one. But let's just explain how the French system works, right? So the first election, loads of runners and riders, Le Pen will definitely win that, right?

30:05David McWilliams: But the second round then is basically between the two who, the number one and the person who comes second. And traditionally the person who comes second is centre-right or centre-left. And then what you see is everybody else coalesces around that sort of agreed, reasonable, middle-of-the-road candidate. And as a result of that, the Front National or the national rally rarely get 51 % of the vote, right? So the assumption is always that the system in France set up such that none of the extreme left or the extreme right can win, even if they win the first round. Right, okay. Expect Le Pen to win the first round hands down, but it's the second round.

30:56However, this time around, because the centre-right and the centre-left are so discredited,

31:03David McWilliams: because the Parisian elite are regarded as being centre-left or centre-right, because the people who go to the Haute Ecole and these high schools that they have, which are incredibly, incredibly elitist, they are all regarded as having been emblematic and responsible for the drift of France. So France needs this reset we talk about. So this is why many, many people are saying now, many French commentators, French people, French journalists, French political analysts are saying this time it's different. Like this is echoes of what has happened in America and the rise of populism in America and the Democrats who were then seen as the elite.

31:48and it's also happening in the UK and across the world that it's all veering this direction. You're absolutely right. You're absolutely right. And the other thing you can throw into the mix is not just the economics, John, and the demographics and the politics, the tax rates, the deaths, all those things. It's this thing, the mobile phone. Yeah. Because the mobile phone has completely splintered how messaging is, how messages are created in society. And so what you have is that the French, for example, media would have been kind of left or right, you know,

32:27David McWilliams: and they would normally have been the place that people go to get their news, to get their opinions, to get their editorial. Now, of course, like everywhere in the world, the media has been fractured, so there is no central editorial. So, for example, you know, in the case of Ireland, you know, when we were young, there was probably about three or four opinion makers in Ireland, big ones like RTE and maybe the Catholic Church and the Fianna Fáil Party. These were the big opinion makers. Now everyone's an opinion maker. So it's shattered the centre in a way that then leads people to think, okay, well, look, are there too many immigrants here?

33:05David McWilliams: Yeah, there are. Let's kick them out and we'll see how we go. But I think what is basically happening is, and this is what brings us right down to the interesting role of the football team, right? Yeah. Le Pen has said that race, immigration, Islamophobia, the Islamification of France, all has France on a trajectory which goes away from what they are celebrating today, which is the values of the French Republic. And the first value of the French Republic is secularism. France is a non-religious country by definition. And of course, this is why they've had all these problems with the hijab and all these sort of things over the years because Muslims in France are much more likely to show their religiosity in public.

34:00David McWilliams: And they're much more likely to actually be religious. And so what Le Pen is using is this fear of Islam as stoking up resentment. and, of course, she's tapping into a real, real fear that exists within societies. It's in Germany. I mean, you know, we know the story. Europe has had a surge in immigration in the last five or six years, and this has tipped societies everywhere. UK, Germany, France, Italy, all those places. You know, you see, when Maloney wants to be popular, she'll just ratchet up the anti-immigration thing, you know, ever so slightly. And of course, the whole thing, they'll be asked some questions like, what is France for?

34:44David McWilliams: Is France a multicultural society? Is it a melting pot? Is it a tapestry? Or is it a country for French people? And then what do French people look like? And do French people look, you know, do French people look like Kylian Mbappe? That's what we're getting down to. And of course, for so many years, the French right wing hated the football team because the football team, even going back to the 1996 football team was large, not largely, but had a significant African and Muslim presence. So Zinedine Zidane, you know, he's not Jean-Paul Leclerc, you know, he is an Algerian. Yeah. And so for a long, long time, the football team, John, has constituted a sort of an unofficial opposition to the French right wing.

35:32It's interesting, I don't know if you saw the comments by Celeste Amaria, who is the Paraguayan senator. She said the most racist stuff of all. But her colleague then followed up by saying in 2014, Paraguay played France. In 2026, Paraguay played Africa. Yes. You don't get more racist than that. But I mean, that sums up kind of what you're saying. Well, it's an interesting point. If you go down to that part of the world, Paraguay, Uruguay, Argentina, that part of the world, they're exceptionally white-looking countries. They look like Europe did in the 1950s, which is why there's a lot of people are facing them.

36:16Yeah, I mean, it's extraordinary stuff, what they're saying. But let's come down to this issue. This is the issue that Le Pen will fight on. And this has split French society. Because let's just think, right? The left are seen as, on the cultural war, too close to multiculturalism, too close to Islam, too close to immigration, too soft on all these issues. The left is seen for many traditional working class French people as having got lost in the LGBT debates and should we have mixed toilets and all that sort of stuff, right? And they've moved away from the core message of the left,

36:57David McWilliams: which is to look after the working man and the working woman. And so the left is discredited. The center right is seen as entirely elitist, globalist, corporatist, lining their own pockets. I'm all right, Jack. And meanwhile, the French working man and woman get left behind. The gay get left behind in suburbs that used to be white, which are now increasingly African. So they feel threatened. So Le Pen is feeding into all this stuff, right? This is the politics of the AFD. It's the politics of reform in the UK. All that stuff. We know it, right? But the French football team have become this beacon of multiculturalism.

37:40David McWilliams: And Mbappe, who is half Algerian, half Cameroonian, so he's a classic product of what they call the banlieue. The banlieues are these suburbs, largely in Paris, in Lyon and Marseille. And they are poor, they're black, and they're Muslim. So it's basically where the poor people are. So, you know, if you think of the people who came out of that, and there's riots, and you see sometimes the Moroccan guys' riot, and the Algerian guys' riot, it's all in these specific areas. So what France did was when French immigration, after the collapse of the French Empire in Africa, they basically shoved all the African immigrants into these areas, right?

38:24And kind of forgot about them, right? If you're interested in it, there's a great movie called La En, which is about going up there

38:32David McWilliams: and it's well worth watching. But they are the source of the French football team. That's where Patrick Vieira came from, Thierry Henry came from, Paul Pogba, Kylian Mbappé, Kante, Dembele, all those guys came from these suburbs. And of course, now the French team is largely drawn from these suburbs. And of course, Mbappe, because he is not only the captain, but he's probably the most successful French footballer since Zidane, Mbappe has become extremely vocal in attacking what he sees as the racists in Le Pen's party. There's a quote from him here. Mbappe himself, he said, we must fight so the national rally doesn't get in.

39:22David McWilliams: He said that in 2024. and he said, we cannot leave the country in the hands of these people. He said, I know what it means and what the consequences it can have for my country when people like them come to power, right? So that is Mbappe. So Mbappe has taken it upon himself. He's taken it upon himself to be a spokesperson for tolerant, liberal, multicultural, multiracial, and multireligious France. And again, he's particularly suited to that because one of his parents is from Cameroon and one of his parents is from Algeria. So he understands the African culture and he understands the Muslim Islamic culture.

40:03David McWilliams: And he also is a product of the French suburbs. So what he's saying is that France looks like me. What the pen is saying is no, France doesn't look like you. France looks more like Eric Cantona. Even though Eric Cantona was also the son of immigrants. Was he? Right. Yes, Eric Cantona's mother was the daughter of Spanish communists who came over to flee Franco, number one. And his father was a Corsican, who many French people don't regard as even French at all. And the interesting thing is, I mean, the whole race thing is so interesting because even Le Pen's right-hand man is a guy called Bardella.

40:40It's an Italian name. He's the son, or he's the grandson of the Italian immigrants. So it's all a mix. But let's get back to it. If the French football team win the World Cup, there will be a boost for centrism, tolerance, etc.

40:58David McWilliams: It will be used. Because people will say, look, we produced the best football team in the world from these suburbs. These are the new heroes of the French kids, right? And these are what France looks like in the 21st century. Of course, Le Pen will make it all about Islam. She'll make it all about terrorism. She's probably hoping for some sort of awful attack during the campaign, simply because that would push the French people who are already, as we know from the polls, very, very divided. And so the World Cup doesn't just mean winning the football tournament for France. It means a cultural statement about what sort of France is in the ascendancy.

41:41David McWilliams: And so what you're going to find is that if they win the World Cup, This will be used by Mbappe and other spokespeople for the French youth as saying, look, this is what we are. We're a multicultural country. But does that mean that it's going to be more of the same then if the centrists win? That's a really brilliant way to end, John, because that's exactly the question. So we know that the French debt-GDP ratio is unsustainable. We know their budget deficit is unsustainable. We know that nobody wants to raise taxes because you raise taxes, people get pissed off, right? We know that nobody wants to cut welfare because if you cut welfare, other people get pissed off.

42:20So the country's stuck.

42:22David McWilliams: Then do you need a political or an economic crisis? So the political crisis looks like what we've outlined, which is a Le Pen government comes in, has deportation of foreigners, resets the clock, tells the European Union to back off. She was advocating many years ago leaving the euro. She's not anymore. but you have a political crisis which leads to a systemic change in France. Or you have possibly the other way of going, which is that within the European Union, the weakest link in the euro chain is the fact that each country borrows separately and each country's borrowing is rated separately.

43:06David McWilliams: what happens in the event that France begins to go bankrupt? And by going bankrupt, I mean that it cannot roll over its enormous debts because people say, look, if you can't make decisions about anything, that means we just drift. If we drift, it means we just incur more debts. You don't have your own exchange rate, so you can't devalue to become competitive. Your people won't accept lower wages and austerity to become competitive, as Irish people did in 2010, 2012. Irish people took massive real wage cuts. That's right. Lots of people immigrated. And the economy rebalanced itself. That ain't going to happen in France.

43:48David McWilliams: So that mechanism is not going to happen. They have no exchange rate, so they can't devalue the franc as they used to do years ago, because the franc doesn't exist anymore, right? So if you're not prepared to do any of those things because you can't, and you're not prepared to raise taxes or cut welfare or do something dramatic, well, then you're in a cul-de-sac, which is thankfully, John, a French word, which is one of the very few words we use in France. So this is only cul-de-sac. So what I'm saying is France is on the verge of something major. The World Cup puts into stark relief the contrast between two versions of France, two iterations, two interpretations, two visions of France.

44:29Yeah.

44:29David McWilliams: And into that brew is a slowing economy, large-scale immigration, and a vacuum right at the centre because A, Macron, the personality, is gone. He can't run again. And B, there's no one to replace him. So the cul-de-sac is where we are, Jean. Leave it there. Let's go back and watch a bit of football. Au revoir.

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