Le Pen pusher: Macron wins again

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. In London, I'm Jason Palmer.

And in New York, I'm John Fassman. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

America's Secretaries of State and Defense secretly visited Kyiv this weekend. They promised more than $300 million in military financing for Ukraine, in addition to the $800 million in military hardware announced last week. We look at the flow of weapons into the country and how they're making a difference on the ground.

For most people, a license plate is a thing to stick on your car and forget about. But in Britain, vanity plates are increasingly popular and increasingly expensive. Some can fetch over half a million pounds at auction.

First up, though, Emmanuel Macron made history again. Last night. He became the first sitting French president in two decades to be re elected, winning out over the far right candidate Marine le Pen by 58.5% to 41.5%. His supporters, who gathered near the Eiffel Tower for an election night party, sounded overjoyed. His detractors, both in Paris and Lyon, weren't so happy. They gathered before the vote to protest and after Mr. Macron's win had to be dispersed with tear gas. Not far from Mr. Macron's celebrations, supporters of Marie Le Pen voiced their disappointment with the outcome. At her election night gathering, Ms. Le Pen vowed to continue in her fight. And made much of the fact that she'd improved upon her 2017 performance when she'd got just 34% of the vote. She then led her supporters in a rendition of the national anthem.

Vive la Republique.

Vive la France.

Elsewhere, it was a grand release of tension for those who had worried about a populist upset akin to Brexit or the election of Donald Trump. In this ninth and final installment of our French election series, we're asking what Mr. Macron's victory means for France and for would be populist challengers elsewhere.

Macron chose to hold his election rally last night at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, which was a spectacular backdrop, but I didn't feel that the mood was really ecstatic.

Sophie Petter is the Economist's Paris bureau chief.

When the result was projected onto the giant screen which had been set up next to the stage where they were expecting Macron to come and talk, and he turned up later that evening, there was just a sort of sigh of relief. It wasn't jubilation, it was relief.

So, as you say, a sigh of relief then, for him, for his supporters, for the people who worked on our election forecast model, which basically predicted this result, but the margin of the win was even narrower than it was in 2017. What does it mean for you that Ms. Le Pen came that much closer to winning?

Well, I think it does show that France is a very divided country, and this was the case in 2017 when Macron was elected. But it's even more so in a way now when you see that the vote for the extremes or for radical populist candidates has actually increased on his watch. And I think that, you know, we've seen that during this series. We've talked to people in all sorts of parts of France who feels disenfranchised, who feel that they've been left behind by the economy, by the way in which the system works. And I think that sort of fractured country is going to be one of Macron's biggest challenges going into the next second term. I mean, that's the other point to make, is that the appeal of populism is on the rise everywhere, you know, from America to Hungary to Poland. And it's very difficult if you're a centrist, liberal Democratic politician trying to dent that appeal. And I think what we've seen in France is that you can have a really quite decent track record on jobs, on incomes, on managing the pandemic and still it's not enough to stop the forces of populism rising.

And so is it your sense that she is gathering up the votes of the disaffected in France and that that will continue? Will we see this again in 5 years time?

I don't think Marine Le Pen will be the only champion of the sort of disenfranchised or the disaffected over the next five years. I think she will be one of them. But what we have seen is that is nonetheless a fragmented political picture in France. Macron has created this huge centrist church in the middle of French politics, and that has in many ways pushed out to the extremes all opposition to him. And it's not just Marine Le Pen, although she will clearly be a figure in that opposition.

And what about levels of engagement, though? The turnout in this election was 72%. That's fairly low by French standards anyway, and lower than 2017. And what I found when we were reporting for this series in France was a tremendous amount of apathy. There were just a lot of voters who felt. Who sounded disengaged.

No, I'm not too much into politics, but no, just.

Actually, I'm just waiting for my. Why do you suppose that is? Why are there so few people who are willing to say I feel for this candidate very strongly?

Well, I think that one issue this time, and that particularly was the case with the second round vote, is that it was the same choice all over again. Now, I mean, the French were the ones who made that choice, that they had 12 candidates and they put the same two in the runoff. But there was a sense of deja vu. There was a sense that the system is very frustrating for those who didn't back either of the runoff candidates. And so I think that feeling that there was nothing new here, that it was the same choice, that didn't help. But I think there's a sort of bigger picture going on. And that's something to do with people feeling that representative democracy just isn't quite working for them in the way that it perhaps did in the past. There's a sense, I think, among those who Le Pen, she calls them the forgotten. It's the sort of feeling that politics, that the political system, that political parties don't represent ordinary people in some way as they used to. And I think that that has put people off from voting and from taking part. And we saw that in the turnout partly at the first round of the French election, but in particular at the.

Second round, and given that fraction of the electorate that feels left behind, that they've just had a rerun of an election, and the candidate who's staked out a big fat center of the country's politics but is largely unloved again gets in office. Is that going to prove a problem for him in his second term?

I think it will be an issue for Macron's second term. There are parliamentary elections in June, so Macron first of all needs to win a majority. And it's far from guaranteed that he's going to do that. I think he probably will. But it will be made up not just of his party, but of a sort of cluster of friendly micro parties that are being put together at the moment. And then in France, you know, opposition often doesn't come from parliament as much as from the streets. That's a great tradition in France and I think we've seen it in the past, obviously, you know, with the Giles Jaune, the yellow jacket protesters took to the streets in late 2018, early 2019. That was a form of protest that nobody had really seen coming, but it was a way of voicing grievances that was quite novel, quite violent in some respects, and very powerful. And I think it's that that could happen, some form of protest that is extra parliamentary. That does represent exactly this sense that we were feeling, talking to people throughout this campaign, that the system doesn't work for them and they didn't want Macron to be re elected. And rather than accepting that that's the democratic system deciding to take that to the streets and to protest. And I think that's what's going to make things probably very diffic him in particular when he puts in place some of the measures that are not popular, like, you know, raising the retirement age. So I think it will be a difficult second term for him. Yeah.

And when we started this series, we were speaking to you in St. Brice souffle, which you said was the kind of place that would decide this election and where you said the Gilets Jean protest message was still out in force. Do you think that labor tensions like this are going to stick around? Is there a Gilet Jaune Chapter two.

AWAITING I think it's quite possible that we'll see some form of protest. Whether or not it's exactly the same, takes exactly the same form is hard to tell. But I think looking at Saint Bris Souffoy, which we went, we did our very first in the series of reports on the French election from. It's fascinating because yes, of course, they did have those Protesters who are still out there. This was at the beginning of the year, but when I looked at the voting patterns for last night in Saint Brice, they voted, 64% voted for Macron. So, you know, it is really a divided picture. I think that's the point that one has to remember. You know, there is a sort of silent vote for the president, which is there and was represented in a place like Saint Brice. And yes, there is also that vote, that angry vote that didn't vote for him, and that is probably in some ways going to take that discontent out on the president in some form or another. But it's very difficult at this point to imagine exactly what form it would take.

Now, this being the last episode in our French election series, and we really have turned over every issue in French politics along the way. What's the big takeaway for you about what this election has shown about the electorate, about France, even about Europe?

Well, I think one of the themes that's come out throughout our series, Jason, is the divided nature of France. You know, we looked at that right from the beginning, and it remains the case today. And I think it emerged all the way through the campaign. You saw the surge of various different populist candidates who ended up doing really well. Marine Le Pen on the hard right and Jean Luc Melanchon on the far left were both really symptoms of that sort of anger at the extremes and in the fringes and indeed among a big chunk of the French population. And I think that that is one thing that we can take away from this series. I think the other thing, though, is just the remarkable nature of the Macron victory. I think in looking at the figures about those who didn't vote for him, we can sometimes get bogged down in the detail of that and forget the bigger picture, which is this is only the second time that Emmanuel Macron has ever stood for any elected office. You know, he's stood twice, each time for the presidency, and each time he's won. If you think back to the end of last year, when the Republican Party, the center right party, was holding its primary, it was Valerie Picres who won that polls were suggesting she might beat him in the second round. So, I mean, at that point, it didn't feel at all guaranteed that Macron would go on to win. He left it very late because of the war in Ukraine, to even start campaigning. He only held one rally. Do you remember the rally at La Defense that we reported from before the first round? And then there was only one big rally in Marseille, which We also reported from between the first round and the second round. So, you know, he didn't campaign as much as he might have done. It was a very odd time to be holding an election because of the war in and on the doorstep of the European Union and at the end of two years of pandemic when people are very tired. So in so many respects, I think the odds were stacked against him. France hasn't elected a sitting president for 20 years. So I think one thing just to not lose sight of is the fact that this is a remarkable result for a 44 year old who now has one more term left. And I think that that came out in our reporting right from the start, that there is a remarkable story in France itself, and that's the story of Emmanuel Macron.

Sophie, thanks very much once again for your time.

Well, thank you, Jason. It's been a real pleasure. Thanks for taking so much interest in what's been going on in France.

One last run out for our catchy series theme. The series was produced by Alize Jean Baptiste, edited by Kim Gitelson, and sound mixing by Will Rowe. Many thanks to Sophie and to Emily Upton for their extra assistance. We'd like to know what you thought of the series. Drop us a line@podcastseconomist.com.

President Joe Biden has pledged an $800 million package of military aid to help Ukraine fend off its Russian invaders. Our unity with our allies and partners and our unity with the Ukrainian people is sending unmistakable messages to Putin.

He will never succeed in dominating and.

Occupying all of Ukraine.

American hardware, as he put it, would head directly to the front lines of freedom. The United States is far from the only nation sending weapons to Ukraine. The country has received intelligence, artillery and ammunition from across the West. Such extensive military support has helped push Russian forces eastwards and will now become a major factor in the battles taking place for the Donbas.

I don't think anybody expected that Ukraine would be receiving this quantity of Western arms several weeks into a Russian invasion.

Shashank Joshi is our defense editor.

I suspect this is probably the biggest flow of arms to a single country in such a short space of time since the end of the Second World War.

And why did you not expect it? Is it that it just hadn't been done before or that there was some skittishness about being involved in a war against Russia, or both?

It very much was both. I think first of all, John, there really wasn't a sense that it would be a Ukrainian government to send this stuff to. Nobody thought The Kyiv regime would survive this far in, let alone be able to play host to European presidents and prime ministers. And there was absolutely also a skittishness about provoking Russia. I thought Ukraine would receive a lot of arms, but I thought it would all be done in secret. I thought you'd have the CIA and the secret Intelligence service of the UK and others sneaking around Poland, giving them small arms and getting that stuff over the border in unmarked convoys. I didn't think you'd have the President of the United States sitting in the Roosevelt Room boasting about how they're sending huge numbers of anti tank missiles.

So let's talk about exactly what they're getting. You mentioned anti tank missiles. What else has Ukraine received and from whom?

If you follow this war on Twitter or on social media, you would think it's a war about Javelins. You know, these little 15 kilogram shoulder fired anti tank missiles, blasting the turrets off tanks or Stingers, the missile made famous by the Soviet Afghan war. Taking down Russian helicopters and all of that stuff is important. And the Ukrainians have received huge numbers of portable shoulder fired anti tank weapons, anti aircraft systems. But what we are now seeing for many reasons to do with increasing boldness to do with the changing nature of the battlefield, is heavier and heavier weaponry. Things like armoured vehicles, tanks, artillery pieces, drones, suicide drones, loitering munitions as they're called, artillery, ammunition, night vision goggles, all kinds of other things. Not just weapons for ambushes, guerrilla resistance, but really full blown weapons of conventional warfare.

And of the arms that have been tested on the battlefield so far, what have we learned?

Well, a lot of lessons I think first of all, anti tank weapons have been fantastically successful. They have taken out huge numbers of Russian tanks and a lot of Russian armour and artillery has been really significant in this conflict. But I think the other lesson is we're seeing weapons that haven't had huge amounts of use being used in experimental ways. And I would point to loitering munitions, what you might call kamikaze drones. These are drones that go up in the air, hover around and instead of firing a missile, they themselves plow into the tank or the artillery piece in question. The Americans are sending these other countries are sending these. President Biden said he would be sending a new one that no one had ever heard of until this week called the Phoenix Ghost that was accelerated for Ukraine's needs. And I think that Ukraine is going to be a real proving ground for these kind of munitions in ways that will benefit NATO armies as they draw.

The lessons of that let me ask the opposite question. Are there any weapons that Ukraine has received that have not worked as expected?

The Ukrainians are being very tight lipped on their failures, on their losses, on their setbacks and on the things that haven't worked. So we just don't know. We know they've suffered attrition, they've lost plenty of anti aircraft missiles, surface to air defense systems like the S300. These are bigger systems. The Russians can probably spot them slightly more easily. So perhaps lesson is concealing bigger systems from Russia is not an easy thing to do. And now as the west begins to send more and more stuff, there is going to be the question of do we just send the Ukrainians old Soviet kit or do we have to start sending them stuff that we have lots of but they may not know how to use? So NATO standard artillery, to give you an example of that, the Americans are now sending 155mm howitzers. These are big artillery pieces. They're going to need some training on this because it's not easy to switch from a Soviet artillery system which uses one calibre of ammunition to another one. The targeting system may be different, the radar may be different, the supply lines may be different, the training you need will differ. So we're going to find out whether that training can be done on a very short timescale.

So this huge consumption in armaments must be a boon for a arms companies. Who's manufacturing all these weapons.

Big Western arms companies are looking at a boom. You look at a company like Raytheon, which is a huge US arms company, their share price has gone up by about 15% in the last six months. In the last few weeks we've seen Joe Biden get together with the head of American arms companies discussing how can they ramp up production for Ukraine. We've seen Germany's government talk to German arms companies about producing a wish list for Ukraine from which the Ukrainians could order. And in the uk the Ministry of Defence has been arranging for Ukrainian officials to watch missiles in action. European countries are saying they will push defense spending up. We've seen the Swedes say that, the Poles say it, the Finns, many other countries, the Germans of course. Perhaps the most important, if The Germans spend 2% of their GDP on their military as they say they eventually will and is the NATO's target, that's going to make them the third biggest arms spender in the world. All of that is going to result in a huge surge of demand from missile makers, arms manufacturers, shipbuilders aerospace companies. And I think this is going to be not just a defence industrial question. It's going to be a really important political question. Is this spending going to go to European companies in the service of the French agenda of European strategic autonomy, or is it going to go to American and British and other companies, regardless of European heritage? In the interest of getting this stuff into front lines quickly? Defence spending is going to be a political and a geopolitical question in the months and years ahead.

And that geopolitical question hinges on concern for future conflicts. Earlier you said that Ukraine is serving in some ways as a proving ground. What do you think Western countries are learning from this war?

I think there has been this assumption that the Ukrainians are doing so well because we trained them, because the Americans trained them, the Brits trained them, the Canadians trained them. There may be an element of truth to that, but what I think defence ministries in the west and indeed in Asia are going to be looking on is what lessons can the Ukrainians now teach us? They have just sunk the flagship of Russia's Black Sea fleet with a homemade anti ship cruise missile, the Neptune, admittedly based on a Russian system, but nonetheless made in Ukraine. What does that teach you about the future of naval warfare? Did they distract the crew of Themoscova with a Turkish drone? If so, what does that teach us about drone tactics and how they interact with naval warfare? How are they taking out Russian tanks with loitering munitions? And how is the battle for the donpass going to go? I think when this war enters the next phase or when it ends, it's going to be Ukrainians who will be invited to NATO training centers to give lessons on anti tank warfare, on naval warfare, on countering the Russian air force, on air defence tactics. They will be the ones who will be consulted by armies around the world for the performance that they have delivered.

All right, Shashank, thanks so much for joining us. As always.

Thanks very much, John.

To make your car stand out from others, you can paint it a flashy color, you can customize it with distinctive styling, or you can carefully choose what goes just below the boot.

Right, next one, lot 876. Someone to be friendly with, I would imagine. Pub 8005.

To get your hands on an especially desirable number plate in Britain, you'll have to sit through a live auction.

The bid is 5200. £5002.

The competition can be fierce with an.

Absentee bid at 5,258. 6,000. Back with the absentee bidder. 8. I'm never going to go with the absentee bid at 8. Sold at £8,000.

But prospective owners don't seem deterred by the steep prices. The personalized plate market is flourishing.

Personalised license plates are pretty popular in the uk.

Jesse Mathewson writes about Britain for the Economist.

Britain's owned about 3 billion pounds worth of custom registrations in 2020. According to the Office for National Statistics. There are about 50 million available on the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency website. That's the government agency that sells new personalized plates. And the interesting thing is prices have gone up during the pandemic, probably because many people were stuck at home with time to browse and money to spend.

You say prices have gone up. What kind of money are we talking about here?

So the price varies from a few hundred pounds to six figures. The DVLA issues new plates with the latest date code twice a year. And the most valuable plates are sold at auction along with older style plates that hadn't previously been released. At the most recent auction earlier this month, a plate numbered 53 NGH, which looks like the name Singh, sold for £61,010. So almost $80,000. The registration 8 toy was the second most expensive plate at just over £43,000. Dealers told me plates featuring the number 8 often go for a lot because Chinese buyers associate it with wealth and luck. And Bot 70X, which looks like Botox, sold for just over £10,000.

What's the history of these sorts of personalized plates? When did they get started?

Registration plates were introduced right at the start of the 20th century. As the number of cars on Britain's roads increased. The country's first number plate, DY1, was issued in Hastings in November 1903. Memorable registrations were popular from the beginning. So the following month people queued outside the county council office in London to get their hands on the city's first license plate, A1.

Jesse, are there best selling plates? Are there plates that do a lot better than others?

Yes, absolutely. So name plates are the most popular choice. Sam, Dan and Ben were the most searched personalisations in 2020 according to the DVLA. And registrations that spell out car models also attract high prices. 25o, Britain's most expensive number plate ever sold at auction went for £518,440 in 2014 to the owner of a Ferrari 250 GTO once driven by Eric Clapton. But there are limitations on what you can buy as well. Some letter combinations fail to meet the DVLA's criteria. For sale. So profanities, obscenities and racial slurs are all banned. And the agency also issues a twice yearly list of politically sensitive number plates that it refuses to issue. An 71 vax, which sounds like anti vax, EU21 bad and TA71 ban, which sounds like Taliban, were ruled out last year.

And you said the cost of these plates are rising. Why do you think people are willing to spend so much on them?

Well, for many people it's a means of self expression, like clothes or accessories, and people can spend thousands on those things too. But for some, it's about more than vanity. There's a growing interest in number plates as an investment from some customers. Once auctioned, plates can be traded on the secondary market and you can make a serious return there if you pick your plate wisely. So one BNK, which sold for 8,900 pounds in 2014, went for 75,000 pounds in 2021, which is an 843% markup. The latest fad is plates that allude to cryptocurrencies. NFT3, which refers to non fungible tokens, sold for £10,000 in the most recent DVLA auction, and CR11 PTO went for £27,490 in March. Buyers might well be hoping to sell these new plates for a lot more money, but I'd be a bit wary. Dealers say this trend basically carries the same risks as investing in cryptocurrencies themselves.

Jesse, thanks so much for joining us today.

Thanks for having me.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. As ever, you can let us know what you think of the show@podcastseconomist.com and.

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