F. F. is Richard Ames.

France, like the UK, has just had a parliamentary election, but unlike the UK, no one's exactly one.

In the second round of elections, the left emerged as the biggest block in the Parliament, so

hooray for that. And the far right was relegated to third, having looked

scarily close to a majority in the first round, so also hooray for that.

But because no one has a majority, now begins a period of intense wrangling in the halls of power.

Meanwhile, street movements of both the left and

the right are escalating. Neo-Nazi fire bombings of black-owned bakeries, Union protests, wildcat strikes, insurgent youth movements,

and an immigrant worker movement are all gathering.

But are these events simply the surface of something deeper. In this episode,

Ollie Haynes, a freelance journalist and co-host to a podcast about the French

elections called FLEP 24, took me on a journey from the breaking front-page news of the last week of drama

right into the deep structural crisis engulfing the French state. So welcome Ollie Haynes to Navarro FM.

Thank you for having me.

For those who have been transfixed by our own election spectacle in the UK,

they may not have noticed that there has been election in France as well at the same time.

They didn't need to be in much the same way as Ritchie-Souac did not need to call the general election of the UK.

So Emmanuel Macron dissolved the lower assembly or the lower house of the two-part French Parliament and called early elections.

Why? Because it's gone very badly for him. So why would he do that? What did he think you could

gain from doing this and why now?

There are two theories as to why he did this. The first is what you might call the Pedro

Sanchez theory, which is that in the European parliamentary elections

...