The Elections in Britain and France, With Matthias Matthijs and Daniela Schwarzer

LINDSAY:
Welcome to The President's Inbox, a CFR podcast about the foreign policy challenges facing the United States. I'm Jim Lindsay, director of Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. This week's topic is elections in Britain and France.

With me to discuss the results and consequences of the recently completed elections in Britain and France are Matthias Matthijs and Daniela Schwarzer.

Matthias is senior fellow for Europe at the Council and the Dean Acheson Associate Professor of international political economy at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies. He's an expert in comparative politics and European political economy. He recently wrote a piece for CFR.org titled "Pivotal Elections for France and Europe."

Daniela is a leading expert on European and international affairs. Over the course of her distinguished career, she has worked at a range of renowned think tanks, foundations, and universities, including the Bertelsmann Stiftung, the Open Society Foundation, the German Council of Foreign Relations—which I should say has no connection with the Council of Foreign Relations—and the Free University of Berlin. Matthias and Daniela, thank you for joining me on The President's Inbox.

MATTHIJS:
Great to be back.

SCHWARZER:
Very happy to be with you, Jim.

LINDSAY:
So let's jump into it. Over the past five days, we've had separate elections in the United Kingdom and in France. The British elections more or less went as expected. The French elections didn't. So let's begin with Britain. Matthias, the headline in American newspapers is that the Labour Party won a landslide victory. It took nearly two-thirds of the 650 seats in the British House of Commons. What else should we know about the election?

MATTHIJS:
You summed it up well, Jim. I think in many ways, this is an election that was, for the last two years, almost expected. Ever since Rishi Sunak took over from Liz Truss's disastrous sort of forty-nine-day premiership, he was trailing Labour by about twenty points. A few surprises, though, is that in the end what the polls did not capture is the thinness of Labour's victory, right? So the majorities it has in every constituency were down quite a bit and its overall percentage, close to 34 percent, is actually quite low.

LINDSAY:
That's only 1.6 percentage points more than they won back in 2019 and 2019 was Labour's biggest schlacking since 1935.

MATTHIJS:
Absolutely. So, the small majority shifts at the constituency level can have these huge results where with one-third of the vote, they get close to two-thirds of the seats. And, the main story in Britain is just the collapse of the Tory vote. Some went to Labour, but as you said, a very small percentage, but most of the votes went to the Reform Party and quite a few went to the Liberal Democrats, who did a lot better, seventy-one seats. So, if you look at the overall makeup of Westminster, of the House of Commons, it is a center-left sea change there from a kind of center-right to far-right government. So that's the main thing to know. Even you see is Keir Starmer, his own majority and his own constituency-

LINDSAY:
He is the new prime minister of Great Britain.

MATTHIJS:
Yeah. The new Prime Minister of Great Britain, Keir Starmer, has his constituency in the heart of London and his majority systematically has gotten smaller. And, there was quite a bit of independent candidates on the left that challenged Labour, mostly over things like their stance on Israel-Gaza and so on. So, some safe seats were lost, but the big story nevertheless remains that this is going to be very hard for the Conservative Party to come back from.

LINDSAY:
Daniela, how do the elections in Britain look to you?

SCHWARZER:
Well, for the analysis of the results, I'm very much with Matthias that we have to look beyond the actual number of seats to get a full picture of what Labour's victory is actually based on. And, I think in terms of first signalling that the government has sent, from a European Union perspective, this is definitely positive. One of the latest news was that David Lammy, the new foreign secretary, accepted an invitation to join the EU foreign ministers in an upcoming meeting, which was something that for political reasons was not acceptable to his predecessors.

And, so that means that this incoming, or this government which has just come into office, is ready to take a different stance on European, and also foreign affairs, and is ready, in my view, to send those signals home to the voters' base and try and explain why there is an interest that the UK engages more strongly with its former partners in the EU, which are now of course no longer partners in the EU, but it can look at the EU in a different way. But, given what Matthias just said about the voters' base of Labour, of course, there's a lot of caution to be had and a lot of explanatory work to be done to take British citizens along, if that is really part of the strategy that the new government wants to implement.

LINDSAY:
Daniela, can I draw you out in that a bit? What in practical terms does it mean that London may be more open to going to meetings hosted by the European Union? Are we talking about undoing Brexit or are we simply talking about better optics with not much changing in terms the lives of British voters?

SCHWARZER:
What can happen and I really hope does happen is something in between those two options you just gave, Jim. I don't think this is at all going to be about undoing Brexit, and this is nothing that Keir Starmer stands for or his foreign minister or anyone in the new Labour government. However, it's not just cosmetics and the way things look. There is a keen interest, I would say, on both sides of the channel, so in the UK and in the European Union, to improve the relationship. And, I think there is also, it's not just because it hasn't gone too well for the UK since the UK left the EU, but it's really because the circumstances changed a lot. We have a new geopolitical environment which has led to a much closer cooperation between London and continental European players. For instance, Germany and France when it comes to supporting Ukraine, there are bilateral ties between Paris and London around defense and cooperation, in particular on nuclear.

So, there's a lot already in place and Russia's attacks on Ukraine have definitely enhanced security cooperation and the whole defense dimension. So far, this has happened within the framework of NATO or in a bilateral way, but I think the opportunity now is to look at the relationship between the European Union and Britain in a new way. So far, there is mostly the Brexit Treaty and subsequent agreements which regulate the economic relationship between the UK and the EU. And, so I think there is something to do to improve the situation of the UK, and combining this with a more strategic geopolitical and geoeconomic view of how the EU and the UK can work more closely together, I think that's what should be on the political agenda and there's a real chance that it is.

LINDSAY:
You want to jump in here, Matthias?

MATTHIJS:
Yeah. Keir Starmer, himself, has said very clearly during the campaign that there was not going to be a reversal of Brexit or a joining of the European Union in his lifetime.

LINDSAY:
But, why not? Because if you look at England's or Britain's economic performance over the last fifteen years, it's well behind the United States, it's well behind the EU average, and it seems to be two major economic mistakes: pursuing a policy of austerity after the great financial crisis and then Brexit.

MATTHIJS:
Absolutely, I couldn't agree more with you on the terms economically, just politically, every focus group that people did during the campaign, the fifth or sixth issue they'd bring up after immigration or public services would be Brexit. And, the universal reaction of the focus group participants was eye-rolling. It was like, "No, no, not again. Let's not talk about it." So, it almost is that the British political establishment has agreed to just not revisit this for a while.

That said, where, and Daniela wrote a very good piece in the Financial Times on this, and I addressed this with Mark Blyth in Foreign Affairs in early May, late April, that there is this sort of grand bargain to be done between the UK and the EU where the EU agrees to make life easier for the UK out of the single market and out of the customs union, right? So, they can do all kinds of day-to-day stuff to make just doing business, doing investments, doing exchanges, travel, and things like that easier.

On the other hand, the UK will have to make some sort of major offer when it comes to building Europe's security that they will be a main player on this, right? That's not easy, but it's definitely, as Daniela said earlier, there is a fundamentally different geopolitical situation. Since, number one, the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, and number two, the kind of looming comeback of Donald Trump at the White House. And, if not this time, maybe in four years time.

LINDSAY:
Daniela, with Keir Starmer's ascension to the prime ministership in Great Britain, what, if any consequences, do you see for British support for Ukraine?

SCHWARZER:
Well, I think the UK has shown over the past two and a half years that it is a staunch supporter of Ukraine and has been more proactive than other big supporters, and Germany in numbers is the biggest supporter, but not always the fastest. So when it comes to weapons systems, the UK has been in some cases the first mover, which has given, really, a strong support to Ukraine and that was important on the battleground, and I think that will stay that way. I think if the situation with European partners improves in the strategic perspective of combining the consequences that the new geoeconomic and geopolitical context poses for both the UK and the EU and then combines this with a bilateral agenda between the European Union and the UK that gives advantage to both sides, the UK will come out more strongly and that would allow it to continue that support for Ukraine. And, I do believe that with this new government in place, the UK will stay an absolutely reliable partner with a NATO and a supporter of Ukraine in that role.

LINDSAY:
Did you want to add anything, Matthias?

MATTHIJS:
Just I think on foreign policy there's going to be very little change with the difference of the form of it, right? There's going to be much better relations with Europe, so you're absolutely right on that. It reminds me a bit of the beginning of the Biden administration, where you had this sort of center-left American government re-establishing its allies and the rapport with its allies around the world. I think the UK and David Lammy will want to show that they're back in business internationally, both commercially and politically.

What they have a much harder time with, I think, will be domestically. Here, I've called it homeopathic Bidenomics without the continental-wide scale and without the fiscal largesse, right? Basically this government is a fiscally conservative government with progressive social issues, and that's very sort of Bill Clinton 1990s, very Obama 2008, 2016. I guess many liberal cosmopolitan elites are very comfortable with all of this. But the question is, can they, in four years time, show that they've improved the lives of ordinary Britons, which drove them away-

LINDSAY:
You sound skeptical they will be able to unless they spend a lot, which they're not inclined to do.

MATTHIJS:
They're not inclined to do it. It's very, for the listeners who might be old enough to remember Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, the first term of Blair and Brown in '97 to 2001 was prudence for a purpose. The idea was we're going to keep the Tory spending plans and we're not going to do anything big in the first term, but then in the second term we'll become more progressive: spending on health education and things like that, which they did. This time it's unclear that they may get to that second term, if they don't change things more radically in their first term-

LINDSAY:
And, Great Britain has major economic challenges, major public spending challenges, correct?

MATTHIJS:
Yes. And, major productivity challenges, right? So, the ambition of the Starmer government and of Rachel Reeves, the first female chancellor of the exchequer, the finance minister, really is to make it the fastest growing G7 government. But, I fail to see how they're going to do this without rejoining the European Union, which would be a major boost-

LINDSAY:
Or, fundamentally changing their economic policy.

MATTHIJS:
There you go.

LINDSAY:
Well, let's switch gears now. I want to talk about what happened in France, which went through two rounds of voting. The far-right, anti-immigrant National Rally Party of Marine Le Pen did very well in the first round of voting, prompting a lot of newspaper copy predicting a National Rally victory in the second round of voting, which concluded this past weekend. Instead, the leading seat winner was the left-wing New Popular Front, a coalition of four parties that picked up 178 seats or about 31 percent of the seats in the French National Assembly. Second place went to President Emmanuel Macron's Centrist Coalition that won, I guess, roughly 150 seats or about 26 percent, and the National Rally and its allies took about 142 seats or about 25 percent. Now, I should note that I think the number is you have to get 289 seats to have a majority in the French National Assembly, so no party has a majority. We'll get into that but first, Daniela, why was the conventional wisdom wrong about the second round of voting?

SCHWARZER:
Well, pollsters predicted not that the far-right, the Rassemblement National, could get an absolute majority, which they were of course hoping for, but thought they would come in first. And, what happened immediately after the first round of elections was that the left side of the political spectrum, several parties including a very far-left party, then the more traditional, the Parti Socialiste, which are kind of social democrats, but then also the Greens and others, they formed an electoral alliance essentially driven by the wish to block the rise of the far-right to an absolute majority in parliament. And, they came forward with a joint platform for those elections within three days, which is a big surprise.

And, then after the first round of elections where the far-right scored very high, they said they would withdraw their candidates if, for the second round, their candidates had come in third. So, they would leave one moderate candidate facing one extremist, far-right candidate, and other parties joined that movement. So, this idea of having a united front against the far-right, the so-called front républicain, this worked out one more time. So, there is no absolute majority for the far-right, and you gave the number, this party and its allies, they have 143 seats. And, although this is not an absolute majority, which was the big fear, we have to recognize that their presence in parliament increased by 60 percent.

LINDSAY:
So, the far-right actually did well, it didn't reach the levels that newspaper critics proposed, but still did very well.

SCHWARZER:
Absolutely. And, why is this important? What everyone is really focused on, also with these elections, is the presidential elections in 2027. And now, with 60 percent more seats in parliament, this means that the far-right gets more party funding, they obviously get more airtime in parliament, but also in the media, so they will be far more present with their positions, with the people that are now new to the French parliament.

And, this will of course change the nature of the political debate and give them far more visibility and more funding to run their presidential campaigns in about two and a half years time when that will start. So, we shouldn't underestimate the fact that from Macron's perspective, the wrong people increased their presence by 60 percent, but they will very likely not have responsibility in the government. So, they can sit down, do their parliamentary job and use every occasion to blame Macron or the new incoming government for anything, which they will happily do before they then put up their candidate for the presidential elections in 2027.

LINDSAY:
Daniela, one of the striking things for me as I was looking at the numbers from the voting in France over the weekend was that the National Rally party actually was the biggest vote-getter. They received something on the order of 37 percent of the vote, yet they came in third place in terms of the numbers of seats. That's because of this strategic coalition that was formed to sort of block them. I'm wondering from your sense, how is that result playing, or do you see it playing, with the French public? I know that Jordan Bardella, the twenty-eight-year-old protégé of Marine Le Pen has talked about, "This is a dishonorable action." I was wondering if you see the far-right being able to play the argument in France that in some sense they were cheated out of the electoral victory that would have reflected where the public actually is.

SCHWARZER:
I'm not sure whether they will make a lot of use of the word they've been cheated, but definitely they can point to an electoral system which, in the second round if there are only two candidates in a constituency, is a first-past-the-post system, which by definition is a winner-takes-it-all system.

LINDSAY:
Which is what we have in the United States.

SCHWARZER:
Yes. This is a recurrent debate about fairness of the voting system and the larger the discrepancy is between the result of actual votes and the number of seats you get in parliament, of course, the stronger the argument gets. And, given the degree of expectation among far-right voters that their party could potentially get an absolute majority, of course right now there is a lot of disappointment and also very harsh criticism of Macron, of the left, and so on and so on.

So, it's a very emotional situation. You could see that in yesterday's reports about party gatherings, people on the street, the way they commented. And, of course the party leadership will use those feelings towards the sitting president, but also the newly formed government, and will exploit this disappointment and fire them up and make them believe that 2027 is the next big chance. Because, the Rassemblement National has never been in a government in France, of the Fifth Republic, and so their attempt will now be to win the presidential elections in 2027.

LINDSAY:
So Matthias, can I bring you in here? One of the things Daniela just mentioned was a new French government so I have to ask you, what is this new French government going to look like? You have no party with a majority. You have three leading party or party blocs that have to some extent antithetical views. Do we have a hung parliament? Do we have some sort of grand coalition? Where do you see France going?

MATTHIJS:
It's an excellent question. Macron's goal was twofold and he succeeded in one. One was to break the sort of far-right populist fever, and I think he managed to do that, right?

LINDSAY:
At least for now.

MATTHIJS:
Yeah, at least for now. Marine Le Pen said herself, it's a victory postponed, right? It's a victory delayed. 2027 is the big one. The other goal Macron had when he called the snap election was clarity from the French voter, governability, and he didn't succeed in the latter, to say the least. He ends up with a truly hung parliament where of course the centrist approach to this would be, well, the center holds. We will pick off the reasonable leftists from the left-wing bloc, meaning the Socialists and maybe even the Greens. That's not enough for a majority with Macron and then will somehow talk to Les Républicains, the reasonable center-right goalists, have about forty seats left, and will form some sort of coalition of national unity. That's not going to be the outcome, right?

I mean, clearly on the center-right, the Republicans, ran their own campaign, didn't make any alliances, and ended up with the same number of seats and they're going to be very hard to convince to do anything with Macron. And, the left, the most reasonable part, again, the Parti Socialiste of previous President François Hollande, who's also elected as an MP, but their leader already said, "We're not working with Macron's people. We need a new government," and they're sticking, at least for now, to this "We won," as in the left, the New Popular Front won, on this platform of tax and spend, right? Taxing the rich and a little of more spending, and bringing back the pension age to sixty-two or even sixty. And, this is going to be impossible for Macron's people to kind of accept, right?

So, what they now want is a minority government of the left with a socialist, at least, a left-wing prime minister, but that'd be very hard for them to govern. What Macron will want is to wait this out, maybe appoint somebody who's acceptable for now, get them through the Olympics, maybe get them to accept the budget, but this is the opposite of the United Kingdom we just talked about, right? I mean, the one thing we should say about the UK is that, for the first time in eight years, they now have a stable government with a very comfortable majority with reliable policies for the next four or five years. And, I think it will attract quite a bit of money, quite a bit of investments from the rest of the world. France is the opposite, right? We are really looking at maybe new elections within a year. Constitutionally that has to wait-

LINDSAY:
They have to wait at least one year before they have new-

MATTHIJS:
Until June 9, 2025, because that's when parliament was disbanded by Macron, on the day of the European elections. So, you could see some sort of caretaker government, you could even see maybe a left-wing government if they can agree to some sort of budget, but it will be minimalist. And also, Daniela mentioned the Fifth Republic, but this reminds us of the Fourth Republic. The Fourth Republic emerged from the ashes of World War II after the collaborationist regime of Maréchal Pétain and lasted from roughly 1944 to 1958 and it was marked by very weak government with constantly changing prime ministers, constantly changing governments. Which of course, Charles de Gaulle, when he came in as president, the first thing he did was change the system to make a very strong executive. That's why France today has this semi-presidential system with a strong president who appoints a prime minister. So, Macron gets to appoint a prime minister, but then the question is, how effective can that government be and will they be constantly subject to votes of no confidence from within the assembly?

LINDSAY:
Well, let me ask you Daniela, how do you see President Macron responding to the situation he now finds himself in, a situation that he played a large role in creating? And particularly, do you see it changing his approach to foreign policy?

SCHWARZER:
I don't think there will be a major change in terms of foreign policy. And more importantly, as we speak during the week of the NATO Summit, also defense policy. I think that we see a high degree of continuity also because this is really the realm of the president in France according to the constitution. I think domestically, he has one major task for the next, not even two years, and that is to build a successor, because he can't stand for elections again. So, this will be the tricky thing, now that the majority in parliament isn't very clear, he will have to balance all interests to build a coalition that has some stability and bring in a prime minister. But, what he really needs to do is find someone who can run against Marine Le Pen in the presidential elections because she is the very likely candidate of the Rassemblement National.

In terms of governing with this new situation in parliament, it's going to be far more controversial. He will need to spend more time, and his prime minister in particular, convincing the parties in parliament to work productively. He is known to not spend too much time building domestic consensus for measures that he thinks are the right thing to do and there have been backlashes both in terms of demonstrations on the streets, but also parliament not going along with him. And, so he will have a very, very busy agenda for the time coming up and given the composition of the parliament with a strong far-right as we discussed, and also a strong left, including the far-left, there will be a lot of controversy.

MATTHIJS:
On this, Jim, so there's key figures of the current government, like finance minister, Bruno Le Maire, and the previous prime minister who was very successful in Macron's first presidency, Édouard Philippe, that are already saying, "We're not governing with the far-right and we're not governing with the far-left." So, that's very clearly saying, "we're only doing deals with the left if the reasonable half, as they see it, breaks apart."

Now, from the left-wing point view, that could be toxic looking at the next elections. If they're just going to bail out Macron and do his bidding, what's in it for their voters, right? So, that's hard. The other thing is that look at the European Parliament, it's actually quite similar to the French parliament today, but they're used to making coalitions there. That's part of the wheeling and dealing in Brussels, the deal-making there. Many other European parliaments are used to this. They've never had this in France, this sort of constant deal-making with multiple parties. And, also don't forget, the left-wing is four parties, five, really, and there's a few kind of aligned members with it. Macron himself is three, four parties, his coalition. And, then of course the far-right has been propped up by Les Républicains, the ones that split off from it. So, it really is a very fragmented place which will be very hard to have some sort of coherent policy.

LINDSAY:
Well, do you think the left in France is going to maintain this Popular Front coalition or is it going to split? Because, they seem to be united mostly by what they're opposed to, not what they're for, Matthias.

MATTHIJS:
They did the exact same thing in 2022. So, when Macron was reelected as president, he had legislative elections, they united because they thought they'd get a much bigger voting share, which happened, and then very quickly the whole thing fell apart in 2022. I think they're committed to not see this happen this time. I mean, some of the talk yesterday was, "Let's at least for now, negotiate as the biggest party. We have the right to have the prime minister and let's see where that goes." But Macron, as president, doesn't have to appoint one of them. I mean, he may be smart to do that and let them fail or something like this, but I think they are united by a policy of left-wing spending programs that I think will be very hard to accept for Macron's people.

LINDSAY:
Well, let me ask Daniela about that, because the face of the New Popular Front is Jean-Luc Mélenchon and my understanding is that he and President Macron despise one another. So, how do you see this playing out, Daniela?

SCHWARZER:
I do not believe that Macron would nominate Mélenchon as prime minister. I think that is unacceptable to others whom he also needs to provide some kind of parliamentary base and then stability within government, and that is clearly not an option, but Mélenchon will remain a very relevant player in any case and the question of whether the left alliance holds very much will depend on the strategy that he uses going forward.

If you listen to Mélenchon or read him, you get an understanding that for him, parliament is one arena where decisions are made, but he's also someone who has very often mobilized people to go into the streets and to demonstrate and in his vision, fight for their rights or what he thinks is their entitlement to something. And, if you look at the platform that the far-left has negotiated with other left parties, and some of the proposals there really have his handwriting. For instance, a very strong increase in the minimum wage or reducing the pension age again or doing away with European fiscal rules or this, if he decides to mobilize people around those goals can put the streets up against the government. And, that could be a moment where then the other parties will say that that's no longer a tangible alliance. So, there is a risk of this grouping breaking apart over time.

LINDSAY:
Matthias, I want to pull the aperture back and think more broadly about elections. You mentioned that last month we had the European Union parliamentary elections. This has been a year called the "Mother of Elections" given how many elections are taking place, and I'm just wondering as you sort of survey what has happened, particularly in what we like to call the West in terms of elections, do you think there's an emerging lesson that we should draw from it? I've seen some people argue that the main theme really is about the rejection of incumbents, that no one likes their current government and they vote them out. We see that obviously in the British elections and in the French elections.

Another theme I keep hearing is elections really are about the rise of the right. It may be victory delayed, but clearly the far-right is making progress. We can point to that in the French elections, the British elections, the EU elections. Another theme I hear is really talking about the demise of democracy, that either the mainstream parties are succeeding because they can manipulate the voting rules to sort of keep the far-right at bay or it's a case of, as you pointed out, fragmentation. That the center isn't holding, that there's no one or no party that a majority can coalesce around and that democracy is in terminal decline. Are any of those lessons the right lessons to draw? Is there one that you would favor?

MATTHIJS:
I think it's a combination of the first two you mentioned. I am less certain that there's a clear anti-democratic wave going on, especially if you look at the big three, the parliamentary system of the UK, the semi-presidential system of France, the presidential system of the U.S.—I call them the big three of the West that all have elections this year. Nobody is talking about changing the system. Nobody is talking about getting rid of presidential terms here. Even in France, I mean, there was rumors that Macron would step down as president, and he very clearly put out a statement saying, "No way, I respect the institutions."

The same in the UK, right? I mean, yeah, people are upset when they get a lot of votes and not a lot of seats, like Reform, but nobody's really talking about changing to proportional representation, especially not Labour because they did very well in this system. So, I think the combination really is anti-incumbency feeling and a rise of the right, because the right is doing better everywhere. It was in the UK. And, so my lesson for the United States is that this does not bode well for Joe Biden, right? Because, he is the sort of center-left incumbent and you are seeing a rise of the right, and in very close elections, that's probably enough to kind of make that difference in outcome.

LINDSAY:
Daniela, can I ask you what you see the lessons of these elections as, and perhaps maybe give me your sense of how you think this may play out in Germany, which did not have elections in 2024, but has, as I understand, a coalition government that is feeling some internal stresses and is doing poorly, at least in some state elections?

SCHWARZER:
My first lesson would be that France and with it Germany and all of the EU were lucky in that this idea of building a united front against the far-right did work, and I dare say one more time. The degree of uncertainty, the worries about French decision-makers, observers, advisors, basically almost anyone who is related rather to moderate parties in the French political system, there were huge worries ahead of the first and second round of these parliamentary elections.

And, the reason in my view is, and that's a learning for Germany as well, is that there is a growing doubt that this idea that people vote against something, that this gets worn out as a concept. And, France has tested voters several times over the years, beginning in 2002 when Jean-Marie Le Pen, who is the father of the current leader of the far-right, came into the second round of presidential elections. He barely scored 13 percent in the second round because right and left united against the far-right. And, so the question now is how long will this hold? And, the worry is it won't hold much longer, and that means that electoral campaigns need to be driven with positive messages, with visions, with a concept that convinces people. Because what we need to take super seriously, and that also refers to Germany, is the question, why do voters actually decide to cast their vote for a far-right candidate?

You can see in Germany and France alike that a number of topics are recurrent. One is socioeconomic concern and the experience of two years of pretty high inflation, which has led to a loss of purchasing power which is quite considerable. Secondly, the issue of migration and in particular, illegal, uncontrolled immigration is a huge concern for citizens. And then, thirdly, the question of how do the major transitions that our economic systems and societies have to go through—with green transition, with digital transition—how do they affect the daily life of citizens? And, unless the moderate parties provide answers to those big concerns, the extremists will have an easy game.

And, for Germany, the learning is key and we will go to national elections only in 2025, but we have three regional elections in Germany's east; where in fact, the far-right AFD in Germany, a far-right party, which didn't start out as a radical far-right party, but increasingly radicalized over time, right now is polling in first position. And so, we will have, if you like, a test case in eastern Germany this autumn with the September elections in three regions to see how a far-right develops in our own country. And, it's important to look at what happened in France; what moves people in other places, also in the U.S. to cast their vote for Donald Trump; to understand the worries of people, which need to be taken into account far more proactively than has been the case over the past few years.

LINDSAY:
On that note, I'll close up The President's Inbox for this week. My guests have been Matthias Matthijs, senior fellow for Europe at the Council, and Daniela Schwarzer, a leading expert on European and international affairs. Matthias and Daniela, thank you very much for joining me on the President's Inbox.

MATTHIJS:
Yeah, thanks for having us.

SCHWARZER:
Thank you very much for having me, Jim.

LINDSAY:
Please subscribe to The President's Inbox on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you listen and leave us a review. We love the feedback. You can email us at [email protected]. As always, opinions expressed on The President's Inbox are solely those of the host or our guests, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.

Today's episode was produced by Ester Fang with director of podcasting Gabrielle Sierra. Special thanks to Ethan Wickes for his editing assistance. This is Jim Lindsay. Thanks for listening.