TNT Radio host Patrick Henningsen speaks with independent French researcher and journalist Freddie Ponton, analyses the results of the French Legislative elections and explains why many were surprised by it. He also talks about the new French government, what it may look like in the coming weeks, and what it means for the future of France.
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Welcome back ladies and gentlemen welcome back to this live broadcast I'm Patrick Kennedy senior host we are live in direct this is a new time slot welcome everybody hopefully we'll migrate some of our audience and we see some of the familiar faces in the TNT chat room there thank you guys for coming back with us it'll take a while to bring our audience over from the later time slot but we really appreciate your patience on this ladies and gentlemen and we'll money to Friday at this very time that is 1 p.m. eastern standard time in the United States 6 p.m. UK time and also central european standard time for people like our next guest based in france right now freddie ponto independent journalist researcher joining us on the live link freddie welcome to the program hey Patrick great to be here with you thank you for having me it's great to be with you as well freddie and a lot of people were shocked it seemed like anyway all the hype going into the french elections based on the first and second round votes and all of a sudden everyone thought the national rally was going to be running away with it with a massive majority that didn't happen and now we have the political left emerging in france now looking in the command position explained to us what has just happened freddie are you first of all you surprised as so many other people were to see this result how did it happen what does it mean your thoughts well i was surprised yes i know in in a way we very quickly realized that the the centrist on the left came together for the second round with a strategy known as the withdrawal instruction which is basically removing candidates to offer only one fine candidates in major cities and that is to basically directly block the national rally if you will from performing well so they've done extremely well in the first round they confirm obviously their popularity as per the european election so no mystery here the mystery starts when obviously the political maneuvering is taking place and we are basically asking the voters to to reduce their choices by only offering one candidates in cities where they know they can beat marin le Pen in jordan bardella so that's the maneuvering it's not illegal this is just a way to control the opposition so making sure that the far right so-called far right will never access the important position the executive position within the french government so that's really what the result is really about i think well the way i say it is public that there is two winners in this election there is an electoral winner and there is a political winner and as you just said that the socialist party is definitely the electoral winner under the new popular front correlations and then on the other side you have Emmanuel Macron she's the political winner of this legislative elections keeping control the position close to him having basically poorly you pollinate or push for national progress neo-con surrounded basically surrounding his is is the case within the national assembly so i think he's an idea of calling for snap election dissolving the assembly's work extremely well although we know this was not his primary strategy so what does this mean in terms of potential policy some of the big issues of course that fueled the national rallies great showing in the first two rounds the election of course were this EU skepticism euro skepticism little euro aggression to be more accurate and also skepticism regarding NATO and dragging France into a war in Ukraine these are things that mac macron took a lot of heat for in in the previous months so that seemed to be a couple of big issues motivating voters there with this result Freddie are people going to get any are they going to get anything productive on those two areas with with a potentially a left leading coalition here melon shaunce made some pretty powerful statements along this front with Ukraine what do you think well the numbers before for themselves so you have to look within the group who's leading the groups if you look into the new popular front you have basically the followers of glux man the party the socialist party basically leading the the dynamic if you will within the the new popular front on the left and then on the second position you have the the greens and then you have a fleet here that fonts that assume is which one of melon shaunce so jones melon shaunce can say whatever he wants number one he cannot and will not be the next prime ministers because he's simply not in the front row uh as far as influencing where this coalition is going in the coalition of the left and center left it is quite clear that they're going to form a government see what they're going to call it what you know it's going to look like this is still in the shaping as we speak but as i say ensemblies uh and we've run it since macron gabriella tile uh nothing but it's going to change that right because uh when you have a controlled positions with a a program that just simply does not advocate for a exit that does not advocate for uh you know anti nato or actually some kind of a very concrete piece formula for the the conflict in between Russia and Ukraine so what we're going to have and if you really look at uh the discourse you know you understand that this new uh a national assembly will pretty much look the same as what we had prior delicious legislative elections and that is why uh macron as a political win in this instance because marin lepin made a big mistake and uh she decided to to stay within the year to stay with all the the nato and it's not really provided a real change and she addressed the right questions as far as security perhaps looking to the immigration but these are not the fundamental question the real fundamental question is that france is sinking and it's sinking deeper and deeper and we need to treat the problem at the root and and the root causes of the problem that france is facing is that huge debt three thousand billions in debt uh over a hundred and ten percent of the GDP you know uh in debt so it's really hard you know to make any change unless you don't want to make a drastic move towards entertaining the possibility of uh of getting out of the European Union is and uh sending nato where it belongs and then starting to as i said we build france the economy the banking system having our own currency taking care of our borders and starting to recreate this bilateral agreements between nations so if we cannot do that we don't have a country so unless we're going to have people that are strongly believing that the only way for for france to regain some kind of uh credibility on the international stage with controlling their foreign policies and being able to make some important decision with that with regards to import and exports protecting the agriculture's and making sure that we can provide security for the french citizens and going back to some form of discipline in the country and nothing is going to change and unfortunately marin leprene program is at least still full european i don't hear anything really against nato they might have some kind of support for russia but that's marin leprene drawing body lies more intense of kind of supporting your trying so they're playing a bit on both side of defense and unfortunately with the withdrawal instruction for the boaters it's quite clear that boaters were left with no solution no real sovereign solutions and only the small sovereign party like philippo and and few others uh were able to provide that very clear occur to gender and that clear occur program as far as you know fixing being the first state to regain our sovereignty they've not done great they've not done that but it's still too small to influence a dynamic at the highest level within the government so as i said we we're going back to to the old gang for the next uh a few years until until the presidential nothing is going to change and i call it a disaster for france from a from a democratic process called abuse many people have supported candidate but they actually do not support they were just instructed to support this candidate to block the national rally so that's the kind of situation and political situation we've found ourselves in and it's a disaster for the country just know that it sounds like uh you know tactical voting methods deployed it's only it's almost like the you know the the ruling faction got together with the opposition to and said anything but the far right anything but la pan anything but the national we need to do we need to come together to stuff so it's more like the effort is to stop something from happening rather than presenting an agenda that's you know about how to improve things and how to you know bring take the country forward it's no it's about stopping the far right and we see the same coalition in america you have the rhino republicans and the democrats together to stop trump anything but trump and they'll go to any length to do it even if it means breaking the rules of elections politics primaries etc destroying precedent doesn't matter everything just make sure these people don't come to power is that a fair assessment pretty absolutely this is this is exactly what it is and you can clearly see that there's a choice to push forward and we saw that you're in the european election with blokesman and the socialist party doing pretty well in the europe elections and these guys literally were able to increase 100 percent the numbers have sit in the national assembly twice what they got during the the previous election so these are basically people that are picked up you know as the the control the position from the left which worked for on some and for macaron and that's really that the ideas to come in together and if you really want to see really if this is genuine then you just look at the numbers again and we can clearly see when on some with macaron renaissance and so on joining forces with the new popular france when you put all the results together in terms of votes you can clearly see that they still do not get the majority so there are force now to go on the right side of the political spectrum and of course basically the republicans and ask them for few deputies within the national assembly so they can actually have a majority so you end up with literally a rainbow government you know where you get people from the left you get the companies you get uh you get uh the france and sumis that what they call the far left and then you get the greens and then you get also people from the right so it's a it's a male part and we all know that you know it's kind of grand coalitions i call it it's rather ineffective that a governing or or fulfilling the real need of the countries it's the need of more of the political the politicians and their party rather than the need of the french people that has been expressed during the selections and that's just not a what i call a democratic process that's just basically you're ganging up on someone you don't want to see them because their agenda is just way too uh you know on the on the other side of the spectrum and you cannot manage this you cannot manage them within uh you know a strong presence within the national assembly so you'd rather get rid of them and genga even you know allied yourself with people that normally are completely also on the other side of what you stand for so as i say if you get glipsman extremely strong within the NFP and you get macro or sumis people that have complete different views glipsman described himself as an expert in a revolution and we're not talking about sheguevare we're talking about colored revolution guys spend a lot of time in Bulgaria and we all know what happened there so uh what we are saying here is it is uh it's just a wrench in between elites and political groups uh but nothing is going to happen that's going to make a difference for the french bottom line you know the food on the table the security uh everything that's going to improve our quality of life and reducing the debt we're going to get more debt we're going to get more in security a kind of a organized orchestrated care which see if you will but still smooth and operational uh and then we're going to have more emergency power more 497 we don't you know everything's going to be well under emergency power and that's the french we've known for the last five minutes yeah incredible we'll bring this tweet uh up on on screen here for melon shunt uh the opposition leader uh john luke melon shunt basically talking about it's an interesting position and i think uh we'll bring this uh this tweet up on screen if we could um there it is uh he's basically saying it's it is absurd to think that by scaring poutine we will force him to retreat says melon shunt we are not in a position to threaten russia no one can conquer a country with seven time zones which has already been defeated uh which has already defeated both uh napoleon and hitler and he's basically explaining the ridiculous situation of ukraine uh getting nato membership uh there which means that there'll be no peace with russia uh peace will be impossible if we keep pushing for the nato membership that sounds great freddy uh from from melon shunt how likely is this viewpoint going to you know permeate into french foreign policy zero zero because he's not influential enough he's dynamic within the new popular font is very lethal and uh the smoke screen you know when he comes out and national television you know the day off to the election saying that this is it we here we in place we're gonna install our program he's not gonna install anything this is just talk uh he doesn't simply have the uh the representation enough in the national assembly to make any differences and for political survival it will have to to go along with the program it's exactly what we we saw prior to this uh legislative elections is uh it doesn't matter you know when alson proposed something it seems that the rights and the left everybody's go along with the plan because no no one and perhaps everyone knows that it's really truly doesn't matter because at the end of the day the european parliaments and cancel the side of their foreign policies and then the european union decide of you know the doctor in the center what then how should things be done in our country so it doesn't really matter what you believe in you can even be a good will you know good attention if you don't have the level of power in your hands you're you're just done as a fool you know trying to do politics but you cannot support an idea which ideas in the first right decisions about in you know applying this idea and changing them into law is impossible it's not in your hands we have a rainbow government so we're not going to get any melon schmuss pushing this agenda you can sell the beautiful things about you know you know let's try to to talk again let's keep the debate open with putting or simply you know less uh let's challenge the european union and do an ultimate answer for the logical exit to european union all that is thought it's a political jog and it's for you know it's to please a certain elective but it's really not uh you know gonna see the dive so bottom line Patrick nothing is going to change it's a mass and which is called further down into this mass yeah yeah talk is cheap actions are what's needed victor orban president of Hungary with a rotating presidency of the european union he basically has taken action he's got on a plane gone to moscow doing direct talks with the russians talking to the chinese uh we don't see that from anybody else in doing so with the intention of wanting a peaceful solution wanting to avoid war and that's real leadership that's real political leadership coming from a second tier european country so what will it take for top tier so-called top tier g7 uh european countries to do something like this which is to basically stake some political capital on the table and take a risk to to for everybody's benefit obviously i think the electorate in europe and these various countries they want that they want to see that but the political elite class they don't seem very interested in that you we got a couple minutes left your final thoughts before we before we break go ahead freddy well i i mean it's not a secret i'm a sovereign it's so anything that i see that does not present a Brexit and makes it a NATO and you know until the double your shredded body off you know it's nothing is making sense because as i said you cannot govern the country so unless you're going to have this level of power if you don't have a bank and free money and you cannot control your border you don't have a full control of your further policies and you got to go along with a program that is not yours uh days nothing you came to you're losing credibility and uh definitely your you know your your vision is going to be uh very narrow because it has to fit a glove the NATO glove or the EU glove and uh i don't want to wear any glove i want to be able to do whatever we want to do what's worked for us for the French people the people of France need to be able to do what they feel is right for them and honestly we can do that uh then we will we'll slip further down and that's uh that's the reality membership uh global globalist institutions are expensive to belong to the policies are expensive you're looking at the national debt in France i mean this is just astronomical levels compared to previous governments and administrations over the years it was unthinkable even to talk about multi-trillion dollars of debt and it's not going down it's only going up we see the same uh debt GDP ratio trends for the UK uh for Germany for all of the major European countries this is not good this is not going to increase their leverage it's not going to increase their sovereignty as you put it Freddie just negative all the way around we're we need to see political leaders that are going to tackle that issue head on until we do i don't think we're going to see a lot of movement on these policies they're just so constrained by the financial masters of the universe at the central banking level who's going to take on the bankers not macaron that's for sure he's one of them uh Freddie but listen we'll pick up this we'll pick up the thread on this freddy ponto independent researcher journalist base in france really appreciate your excellent assessment of the french elections much appreciated has been my question there he goes ladies and gentlemen follow freddy on x twitter we've tagged him there at lfc news media at 21 wire check out our show post there you want to follow freddy on a daily basis i do and i'm better informed for it let's take a break right now and connect our next guest from the uk to see the fallout from the uk elections we'll get an inside look from a parliamentary candidate from the workers party of britain haz is going to join us on the other side stay with us we'll be right back you [BLANK_AUDIO]
