Far right surges in polls days before France vote

Well, we have been talking a lot on France 24 about the upcoming legislative election here in France. The first round, of course is this Sunday, June 30th, and I'm going to dive a little bit deeper into that with our French Politics Editor, Mark Perlman, who joins me on the set. Hi Mark. We were saying earlier that the far right is seeming sounding very confident going into this vote. Are they right to be? According to the latest polls? They are absolutely right to be confident. They've said they've repeated we need an absolute majority in the National Assembly to be able to really push through our program. And the latest polls we're seeing the images right now shows for the first time that they would indeed get this absolute majority in the National Assembly. The magic number is 289. Those are the number of seats you need to get an absolute majority. So if you look at this, the National Rally is pulling between 230 and 270. However, a small key group is the alliance between the president of the Conservative Party who decided to leave essentially the party with some allies. And there the alliance gives them 20 to 35 seats. So if you do the math, this means that the National Rally and its allies in Parliament could indeed reach this absolute majority. This is only a poll. You see that the number of projected seats is varying quite a lot because those are 577 races. It's very difficult because it's a two round election with a majority system. So it's very, very difficult to project. But it does show that just after the European election that prompted Emil Macron to call for the snap election, they still have the momentum. And they're certainly hoping that this will be able, this will allow them to win round one and be in pole position for round two and eventually get Jordan Bardella Matignon, where the Prime Minister works indeed. So let's say that the far right leader, Jolden Valdila becomes the Prime Minister. Emmanuel Macron for the moment, is still the French President of his centrist party. They call it a cohabitation here. If that were to happen, what would that look like? How would that work? Well, we've had this before three times already. And it's it's obviously a difficult situation because you have a president who was elected who then lost an election and is now with his key opponent, and they have to deal together. The way this works in France is that the Prime Minister deals mostly with domestic issues. The president deals with foreign affairs and defense. This morning, Marine Le Pen, the leader of the National Rally, said that, well, you know, being the chief of the army is essentially an honorific position, meaning that the Prime Minister also has his day. And she took the example of the possibility raised by Emmanuel Macron of sending ground troops to Ukraine. She she said that through his power over the purse, essentially the budget, the Prime Minister could decide that there won't be money to send troops to Ukraine. And so this is clearly already an opening salvo to do a show that Emmanuel Macron that he will not be able to have a free hand on foreign affairs, on defense affairs if Jordan Baldera is elected Prime Minister. So obviously this could be a very, very difficult. Just for the record, every time there has been a cohabitation and then eventually an election, the Prime Minister lost that election. Obviously, this won't happen this time around because Emmanuel Macron will not be able to run for another mandate. But maybe after deciding to call the snap election, he's feeling that eventually in 2027 that when they'll be the next presidential election, having used or maybe abused his position as president and really dent the national rally, he might be able to say, OK, I'm handing the baton to someone from my camp, or at least not from the far right. But this is clearly science fiction right now. The next election is on Sunday, round one. We can expect one thing much more turn out than in the previous legislative elections and in the than in the European election just a few weeks ago.