Le Pen is mightier than before: France’s election

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Hello and welcome to the intelligence from the Economist in New York, I'm John Fassman.

And from London, I'm Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

Much of the modern world runs on encrypted communications. Russia's military appears to be an exception. Their battlefield chatter has been easily jammed and overheard, resulting in massive casualties.

And if you remember the Pokemon franchise, you'll know the memorable phrase, gotta catch them all. The re release of Pokemon themed snacks in South Korea is going gangbusters, as millennials really do try to catch them. But first, Voters in the first round of France's presidential election have delivered their verdict on the candidates who will fight it out in a runoff in two weeks time. The incumbent, Emmanuel Macron, and Marine Le Pen, leader of the nationalist populist National Rally party. Mr. Macron won with nearly 28% of the vote.

Ms.

Le Pen finished with 23. With the other candidates now eliminated, a very different phase of the campaigns will begin. Nothing is decided yet, Mr. Macron said last night. The debate we will have in the next couple of weeks is key for our country and for Europe. Ms. Le Pen too is pitching the battle as one for the soul of the French nation. What's at stake, she said at her election night party, is a choice of society or even of civilization. In the seventh installment of our French election series, we examine yesterday's results and find that a lot has changed since the last time these two candidates went head to head.

Well, the result delivers essentially a rerun of the 2017 runoff between Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen.

Sophie Petter is the Economist's Paris bureau chief.

But this time, I think what we're looking at is something that will be a lot closer. I think that two things emerge from this vote. One of them is that picking up all the votes for the radicals, the extremists, the populist candidate, you come to a higher figure. It's almost 58% than we had in 2017. So Emmanuel Macron's term in office has not actually reduced the populist vote, it has increased it. And the second thing is the absolute collapse of the mainstream political parties of the left and the right. In 2017. The two candidates from the Socialists and the Republican Party got between them 26%, and that already looked pretty poor. These were the two parties that have dominated presidential politics under the Fifth Republic in France. Well, last night, they got between them just 7%.

So essentially, the center has been squeezed out, and a lot of that attention has gone to the extremes. I mean, what did the numbers look like out at those extremes?

Jean Luc Melanchon, the radical left candidate, did really well. He got nearly 22%, and that put him in third place. And he had a very successful late surge, actually quite similar to the one that he pulled off in 2017, even higher this time round. I think some of that is a tactical vote that voters on the left who saw the collapse of the Green candidate, of the Socialist candidate, decided that the best person to vote for, if they didn't want either Marine Le Pen or Macron, was to go for Jean Luc Melanchon. And he definitely did very well, better than he ever has in a presidential election. Of the other candidates eliminated on Sunday was Eric Zamore, the former TV pundit who has been convicted of incitement to racial hatred. Now, he got just 7% of the vote, which was a huge disappointment for him. He was looking quite grim on TV last night. As for the centrist vote, we have Valerie Picres, the Center Right Republicans candidate, who barely got 5% of the vote, and Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, who was the Socialist candidate. She didn't even get 2%, so a real humiliation for her.

Our French election series started with the launch of the Economist's election forecast model. I checked in with our data Journalist Elliot Morris to see how things have been going.

So our prediction model for the 2022 French presidential election works in three steps. First, we take an average of the polls as they are today. So on the eve of the first round, for example, we had Emmanuel Macron at 26% and Marine Le Pen at 23%. After we get that reading of how the state of play looks today, we look to the historical accuracy of polls to get an idea for how accurate they might be at predicting the future. So we look at all the polls in French elections since 1965, we look at their average error on election day, and we simulate the future by essentially asking a single question 10 million times, which is, what will the election look like?

And we spoke to you when the model launched. How did things progress since then? What have the predictions been since then?

Well, the election has changed quite a bit, but simultaneously, it looks very similar. So, when we launched the forecast in February, we gave Emmanuel Macron a roughly 80% or 4 in 5 chance of ultimately winning the presidential election. Back then, he was at about 24% in the polls. After Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, he shot up a bit to about 30%, but has since fallen back down to earth about 26%, according to our average. What really changed is that the Marine le Pen, his 2017 challenger, has surged roughly from 17% to 23%. So the model is looking a lot closer than it did before, giving macron Only a 74% chance of winning. And that's pretty close. That means the average error historically would be enough to upend his lead so far.

By watching how the model has behaved up to this point, how to think about what happens then in the second round.

Well, as the model stands today, we give Emmanuel Macron A 74% chance of beating Le Pen in the runoff, given two things. First, how volatile the polls have been so far, at least in the first round, and Le Pen closing a gap of about 20 point margin for Macron to less than 4 points. Now, I think it's right to expect volatility going in the future. And it's worth reminding ourselves that the entire reason we do this modeling is to figure out how uncertain these pulls are. And right now, they're very uncertain.

So, Sophie, what happens now? How does the race play out from here?

Well, the two candidates are in the final. Emmanuel Macron and Marie Le Pen have just got two weeks to persuade the French that they have what it takes to be the next President of France. And traditionally, the French tend to treat the first round vote as an opportunity to express a real preference, and then they go to the runoff vote, and they use it as a means of eliminating the one that they least like. And in 2017, the one that they least like was Marine Le Pen. And so you saw quite a lot of voters who had no particular liking for Emmanuel Macron, but voted for him in order to keep her out. And the polls are saying that this time on April 24, a lot fewer voters will follow that course.

So why do you think it is that Ms. Le Pen has been able to close the lead that Mr. Macron has held from the start?

Well, I think, as we've discussed before, she has led a very smart grassroots campaign. She's gone all over France posing for photos, for selfies with children, with animals, promising to help with the cost of living, with the price of petrol. And she's really managed against all the odds, to position herself as a calming, unifying leader, which is quite some achievement, given that her program is anti NATO, it's pro Russia, it's Eurosceptic, and that she promises a policy of national preference for French citizens when it comes to jobs and to housing, which would set her on a collision course with the European Union institutions. She has sounded relatively moderate. Yet, if you look at her program, the first item on it is a clampdown on immigration. Her manifesto also includes a pledge to ban the Muslim headscarf from public places and to end the automatic right to citizenship for those who are born in France. But because Eric Zamore has had this even more toxic far right discourse, it's ended up making her look less extreme.

And meanwhile, voters haven't really heard very much from Mr. Macron at all.

Yes. I mean, he came so late into the campaign and on the basis that he was busy with the European affairs and with efforts to end Putin's war in Ukraine, only held one election rally and hardly went out on the campaign trail. Now he's begun to rectify that. This morning, he's off to the north of France. He's going to be in Alsace tomorrow. I think he has probably learned that lesson, that he needs to be seen on the ground campaigning properly and really showing the French that he's going to fight for this. And some of his manifesto promises, such as raising the pension age, which he wants to do, from 62 years to 65, they may be sensible, but they're pretty unpopular. And therefore, despite his decent track record managing Covid or bringing down unemployment, even revitalizing the European Union, Macron hasn't really yet managed to capture the national mood.

And so what is that mood after this first round and in the run.

Up to the second, the mood in France is nervous, it's rebellious. And Emmanuel Macron will have his work cut out trying to win over voters on the disappointed left and on the centre right. And he actually told his supporters this at a recent rally outside Paris. He said there is no room for complacency. And he reminded them about Brexit. He said darkly, what looked improbable can actually happen.

Thank you very much for joining us, Sophie.

Thanks, Jason. Always a pleasure.

In the next installment of our series, we'll take a close look at the incumbent and for now, the frontrunner, Emmanuel Macron. You can find all of our coverage of The Election at economist.com Frank 2022.

Over the weekend, Ukrainian security services released intercepted Russian communications in which Russian soldiers talked about rape and their commanders told them to kill civil. The shocking audio transmissions appear to give evidence of war crimes, and it's not the first time such information has been captured. Last week, Germany's Foreign Intelligence Service revealed that it had intercepted radio transmissions that indicated war crimes were committed by Russians in Bucha. The recordings reveal not just Russian soldiers barbarity, but also their inability to keep radio communication private.

One of the surprising things about the invasion has been the fact that many of the communications by the Russian military have been made over open radio channels rather than secure military communications.

David Hambling writes about military technology for the Economist.

As a result of that, Ukrainian forces have been listening in some of the communications, and we know that some of what they're reporting back to us does check out as being real. We've heard Russian troops complaining about the fact that they can't get any air support. In other transmissions, they talk about lack of basic supplies and can be heard desperately pleading for water and fuel. And we have one recording of troops in an armored column who can be heard saying that they've been ambushed as their vehicles come under fire and their commander has been killed. And that recording actually precisely matches a video that was taken at the same time where we see a Russian armoured column coming under attack. And that's a very strong indication that a lot of these recordings are in fact genuine. We're also hearing reports that German intelligence services have intercepted radio communications between Russian soldiers in which they were talking about shooting civilians. And some of the details of what they were saying, for example, shooting people on bicycles, line up with the evidence that was found on the ground in Buka and give direct evidence of war crimes.

That's gruesome. But just to be clear, the Russian army is using communications that literally anyone with a ham radio could pick up?

Exactly that. Yep, literally anyone with a ham radio. And in fact, many ham radio operators in Ukraine are heeding the call to help and come and get involved by recording Russian military communications and passing those on to their intelligence services.

So I would expect that a modern military would have more encrypted methods of communication. Why are the Russians using these open frequencies?

It did come as quite a surprise that the Russians should be communicating in this open way. Now, we do know that they do have some modern military radios. In particular, they have a set of radios called Azart, which have been in service since 2012. And they're not quite as good as Western military radios, but they're still fairly good. And they're capable of encrypted communication at high frequency and high data rates. So those certainly should be doing the job. The problem is, though, they don't seem to have nearly enough of those to go around. We know even from Russian news reports, because they put out press releases whenever they deliver a new batch of a few hundred of them, but they're delivering a few hundred to units of thousands of troops, so there clearly aren't enough to go around. And even when one unit has a modern encrypted radio system, that's not the end of their problems, because that system may not be compatible with other systems. There is a particular problem between the Russian ground forces and their helicopter crews not having a common radio system. So even though they both have good modern systems, which could be encrypted, they're forced to communicate with each other at the lowest common denominator, which is an unencrypted high frequency channel.

So do most militaries use encrypted systems like the azart? Are they relatively easy to develop?

Certainly. Most modern militaries, everyone in NATO has a comparable system. The problem is that these are extremely expensive and difficult to develop, even when you know what you're doing. For example, the UK spent about 2 billion pounds on a system called Bowman, which has had a huge number of problems. And America spent something like 6 billion on their joint Tactical Radio System, which had even worse problems. So it's quite doubtful that the Russians could actually develop a better system, given that it looks like the entire budget for Azar was only about $250 million.

So I imagine this is an incredible strategic boon for the Ukrainian military.

Yeah, exactly. So right from day one, people have been picking up the fact that there are These open communications going on and that they can be intercept and made sense of even when they're not actually understandable, even when they're partly encrypted, you can still get something out of it. For example, it turned out Russian bombers were using high frequency communication and it turned out to be possible to detect air raids before they happen just by listening in for the radio signals. In other places you can tell what unit is, where and where they're advancing to. Now, I certainly wouldn't believe everything that's coming out of Ukraine, but on the other hand, a lot of the reports do appear to be accurate and there's a consistent pattern of people running out of fuel and not knowing what they're supposed to be doing.

Do we know if this is having an impact on the course of the war?

It's difficult to tell exactly what's happening as a result of radio intercepts. We do know that the US and UK are running these rivet joint flights, which are airliners packed with electronic listening gear, which are flying close to the Ukrainian border and those are just hoovering up all radio transmissions. So it's a fairly good bet that they will not only be downloading everything they can, but they can also do direction finding. They can triangulate the location of a transmission, so they will be pinpointing where all the receivers are on the ground and quite possibly passing that information to the Ukrainians. The other thing we know what's happening is that there's jamming, because if you're just broadcasting on an open channel, someone else can broadcast a louder signal on the same channel so that you can't use it. So we've certainly had quite a lot of reports of Russian forces being bombarded with Bulgarian heavy metal music. The Ukrainian national anthem and Gangnam Style seems to be a particular popular tune for jamming them with. There's also a few recordings where during Russian military conversations a Ukrainian has broken into it and tell them that they ought to surrender and that they're all dead. So clearly this kind of thing is happening and is obviously having an impact on Russian operations.

And does this have any other knock on effect?

Well, something else that's happening as a result of the Russian communication problems is that they're losing a lot of senior officers because there aren't decent communications with the front line. Generals and other senior officers who you wouldn't normally see anywhere near the fighting, are going up to the front lines to try and sort things out themselves and they're getting killed as a result. So far, Russia has lost at least seven generals during this war, which is pretty much unheard of. There may even be a more direct connection with the communication issues. The Ukrainians claim that they've managed to intercept communications from Russian generals, identify them, locate them, and then target them. And that's why they're getting killed. So it's interesting, radio is not one of the high profile systems in warfare. People don't think about modern radio systems in the same way as they think about modern tanks or missiles. But ultimately, it's incredibly important to fighting a campaign. And Russia's failure to invest adequately in modern communication systems is really coming back to haunt them now.

All right, David, thanks so much for joining us.

Thank you very much.

If you were born in the 1980s or 90s, you probably recognize this theme song. Pokemon, short for Pocket Monsters, is a hugely successful Japanese media franchise. When the first video game launched in 1996, it was an instant hit. Soon there were Pokemon toys, card games, TV series, even food. Now Pokemon themed snacks have resurfaced in South Korea, and it's causing something of a frenzy among millennials.

Back in 1998, SPC Sam Luck, confectioner launched a new line of products. They were called Pokemon Bread. Really, they were sort of snack cakes, and they were sold in supermarkets and tuck shops across Korea. And this right at the very start of the Pokemon boom was a huge trend.

Andrew Knox is our sole bureau chief.

All the kids wanted them. They queue up for ages to get hold of them. And then in 2006, they stopped producing them. There was a long hiatus, and then this February, they brought them back after 16 years, and ever since, they've just been flying off the shelves.

So the appetite for these things is still there, even after 16 years?

Yeah, absolutely. I tried to get hold of one myself, and I went to 17 different convenience stores, and each time I was told by the shop owner that they were sold out. Apparently production lines have been running around the clock, but Sunlit can only make enough to supply each convenience store with two a day. So you've got all these aspiring Pokemon masters going really sometimes quite far to, you know, show up at shop, see if they can find Pokemon bread. And there have even been some, like, slightly ugly incidents where Pokemon hunters have been sort of cursing and screaming at shopkeepers for not having these snack cakes.

Now, perhaps I'm asking the wrong question because I wasn't into the Pokemon thing the first time around either, but why is there so much enthusiasm for it this time around?

So, I mean, it's not just about the cakes, but also about these stickers that they have inside. So there are 159 different Pokemon and as the franchise's slightly self serving slogan goes, you gotta catch them all. On my quest, I spoke with Yoon Sansung, who is an avid Pokemon hunter and said that he goes to at least two or three different shops a day to try and get his hands on Pokemon bread. Mr. Yun told me that he loves collecting the stickers because it reminds him of his childhood. He also said that as an adult he's able to buy things that he wasn't able to rustle up enough pocket money for when he was a kid. So I think that the manufacturers of these cakes and the shopkeepers are really capitalizing on the power of childhood nostalgia here.

When you say capitalizing, I mean are they, are they expensive?

No, they're actually very reasonably priced. The recommended retail price is about 1500 won, which is a buck 20. So yeah, more than affordable. And Samlit said that it sold millions of cakes within the first few weeks, far in excess of what they normally do on other product lines. And a secondary market has even grown up around the trend where people are reselling the stickers and even occasionally the cakes themselves without the stickers because they want to keep them for themselves. And sometimes these stickers are advertised at 30 times the retail price of the snack cake itself. Shopkeepers are also taking advantage of it. Some are adding heavy markups and bundling the cakes together with less popular products to try and move things off shelves.

And so is this entirely nostalgia driven? Is this only for the kids that grew up with and still love Pokemon?

Yeah, I mean I'm sure that the company is hoping that these kids, now adults, will introduce their kids to the craze. But all the Pokemon that are appearing on these bread are first generation Pokemon and the game has gone through now innumerable generations to since. So they're very clearly targeting people who are maybe in their 20s and their 30s and this craziness really taken off. But even say RM from the K pop behemoth BTS went on social media to talk about the difficulty he found conducting Pokemon raids and trying to get his hands on some bread and asking the company to produce more. And the trend really shows no sign of. In fact, RM's request has been granted. Zamlet said the other day that they're going to release some new lines of Pokemon bread in order to meet demand.

And why not? There's good money in it. Andrew, thanks very much for joining us and happy hunting. I guess I should say.

Thanks very much, Jason. I hope to catch something.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. Let us know what you think of the show. You can get in touch@podcastconomist.com and you.

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