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00:00Well, I'm joined now by Andrew Hillier from France 24's International Affairs Desk.
00:05Hi to you, Andy.
00:07What a week it's been for French politics.
00:09I mean, I think I speak for everyone when I say that I can barely keep up with everything
00:13that's been happening.
00:15But now with less than an hour to go for candidates to register, both the left and the right are
00:20struggling to put on a united front.
00:22Yeah, that's right.
00:23I mean, it's been a week in which I think French politics really has been turned on
00:28its head.
00:29You know, on the left, we saw look at this.
00:32You can just see how chaotic it has been since Emmanuel Macron called those snap elections
00:38last Sunday.
00:39On the left, we saw unity at the start of the week with the announcement of that popular
00:42front the very next day.
00:44By Thursday, they'd already those left wing parties announced a shared election manifesto.
00:50But by Friday, by the weekend, that unity partly unravelling.
00:56There was uproar on Friday night when Adrien Quatennens, an MP for France Unbowed, appeared
01:02on the list of candidates standing for re-election.
01:05Now, he's a very controversial figure because he actually was convicted for domestic violence.
01:12And at the same time, several figures, these well-known critics of Jean-Luc Mélenchon,
01:17the leader of France Unbowed, they appear to be excluded from those lists.
01:21So that appeared to be a party purge.
01:24He's now, Quatennens has withdrawn his candidacy.
01:27So that will go somewhere, I think, to smoothing over the divisions.
01:30But let's just bring up that graphic again and see what's happening on the right wing
01:34of French politics, because on the right wing of French politics, we've seen a party practically
01:39implode on itself.
01:40On Tuesday, June the 11th, Eric Ciotti, the president of the Republicans, announced an
01:45alliance between his party and the far right.
01:48And then the very next day, his own party announced that he'd been excluded from the
01:55Republicans.
01:56Then Friday, we saw a Paris court suspending the decision to expel Eric Ciotti as president
02:01of the party, a decision that's only valid for eight days.
02:04So we have now, Jenny, this surreal situation with less than an hour to go until candidates
02:11have to register for the elections.
02:13On the one hand, you have within the same party, the Republicans, those who oppose Ciotti's
02:17decision.
02:18These are people who have the party machinery and the party financing behind them.
02:23And then on the other hand, in the same party, those digging in behind that legal decision.
02:28Now, nothing has been definitively decided yet by French justice.
02:32This is a temporary ruling.
02:34And in the meantime, both sides are racing ahead with their campaigns, claiming legitimacy
02:40under the banner of the Republicans.
02:43And Andy, this time last week, we were asking how Emmanuel Macron's bloc would fare in the
02:48EU elections.
02:49Now, we're asking whether he'll be able to govern after July the 7th.
02:53Yeah, I think, Jenny, his announcement last week came as a massive shock, not just to
02:57people watching here in France, but also people watching, you know, across Europe.
03:03Emmanuel Macron claimed that it was a democratic choice after his party's disastrous results
03:09in those European elections.
03:10But essentially what he's done here is he's basically called France's bluff.
03:15He's called the nation's bluff by saying to voters, OK, so you voted for the far right
03:19in the European elections.
03:21Do you really want them to govern?
03:23At the same time, he's called the far right's bluff.
03:26You know, the far right say they're ready to govern.
03:29But this suddenly puts them on a campaign footing, giving them less than three weeks
03:33basically to prepare for an election.
03:36So, you know, all we can say here with certainty is that political norms have been upended.
03:41We've even seen a former president, François Hollande, announce his candidacy as an MP.
03:46That's the first time that's ever happened.
03:48We've seen on the right Nicolas Sarkozy, another former president, criticising the decision
03:54to call snap elections.
03:56So the big question here is this is a huge political gamble.
03:59Will it pay off or has Emmanuel Macron released political forces beyond his control?
04:05All right, I guess we'll just have to wait and see what happens on those first round
04:09of elections happening on the June 30th.
04:12Andrew Hillier from our International Affairs Desk, thank you so much for your analysis.