Pakistonomy

Episode 205 - France Resists the Far Right, For Now

In this episode, Uzair talks to Gilles Verniers about the recent French parliamentary election results. With many expecting gridlock in Paris, Gilles helps us understand what the results mean and what comes next for the country.

Gilles Verniers is Karl Loewenstein Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science at Amherst College, and Senior Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi. He also holds affiliations with the Centre for Advanced Studies of India at UPenn, and the Centre de Sciences Humaines in New Delhi. His research focuses on Indian electoral and party politics, political representation, women and minorities participation in politics and India’s democratic trajectory. He regularly contributes to various Indian media and was based in Delhi from 2005 to 2023. He graduated from Sciences Po, Paris.

You can read his recent pieces on the elections here:

https://m.thewire.in/article/world/france-election-far-right-marine-le-pen-macron
https://thewire.in/world/france-dodges-a-bullet-for-now-but-sinks-in-uncertainty

Chapters: 0:00 Introduction 2:05 Understanding the differences in the groups 9:30 The normalization of the far-right 20:40 Lack of coalition culture in France 30:05 Personalization of acrimony 33:01 The left’s agenda and its foreign policy 38:20 Reading recommendations

Reading recommendations

Cas Mudde, The Far Right Today (2019)
James Shields (2007), The Extreme Right in France: From Pétain to Le Pen

Duration:: 40m
Broadcast on:: 14 Jul 2024
Audio Format:: mp3

(upbeat music) - Hello and welcome to another episode of Pakistani. My name is Uzair Yunus and today we're gonna be focusing once more on elections that are going on around the world. This time we're gonna turn our eye towards the French elections which just happened and in what was basically quote unquote a surprise result if I read most of the media headlines correctly. People were expecting the far right to win which was doing super well, did super well in the European parliamentary elections and then did super well in the first round and second round the left in France held. But Emmanuel Macron's center coalition basically was the loser in all of this. And we're gonna talk about all of that with my very special guest, Jules Vernier. He's Karl Lowenstein fellow and visiting assistant professor of political science at Amherst College and senior fellow at the center for policy research in New Delhi. For those of you who follow Indian politics, Indian political analysis, you probably are familiar with Jio given his work on India and Indian politics but we'll have him on to talk about India and the Indian political system and what's going on there at another moment but today we're gonna be focusing on the French elections. He's written two excellent pieces for the wire recently on the elections as well. I've linked them in the description for you to take a look and read them as well. But Jios, thank you so much for taking out the time today and welcome to Pakistani. - Yeah, it's a pleasure. Thank you, thank you for having me. - I want to start with the coverage of the results, right? Everything I remember, like opening up my email in the evening and Bloomberg's headline was shock election result and the far left wins and those basically, that was the coverage that at least I saw in mainstream Western publications. Help the audience understand why this was a surprise and more importantly, I was just a one-on-one, right? For people who don't really follow French politics, like what's the substantive difference between the three groups that were competing, the far left, the far right and Emmanuel Macron's center? - Yeah. So the first element of surprise was that the far right, which had emerged a very clear winner in the first round of the election and ended up at the third position behind a left coalition and behind the coalition led by President Macron and his own party. In order to understand his sort of reversal, it's pretty rare even in French politics that the winner of the first round doesn't end up finishing at least among the first two parties in the second round. You need to understand a little bit how French electoral system work and how voting behavior also work in France. So the first element is that, and the first shock really of this election was the fact that the far right got as many votes as it did, right? They got nearly 11 million votes in the first round. They have multiplied almost by four, the sheer number of votes that they got compared to 2017 five years ago. So we're talking about an absolutely massive increase. And this is happening in the context of a high turnout election because this was a high stake election. A lot of people who normally wouldn't bother going to vote actually did. participation was 20% higher than in the previous legislative election. And so despite, or actually because of this surge of participation, the far right did absolutely historical score. But in French politics, institutions in a way are designed to keep French formations away by having a two round election. So in the two round election, only usually the first two, sometimes three candidates get qualified or shortly stayed for the second round. And then voters act in what we call tactical voting or strategic voting, in the sense that usually in the first round, they vote for the party that they prefer. And in the second round, they vote against the party that they really want to defeat. And so the expectations in French politics is that even though the far right does better and better in the second round, there are transfer of votes between supporters of other parties that actually prevent the far right from entering parliament. That has worked actually very well for many years. For the first, that is the first two decades after the creation of the foreign national or the national rally, as it is called now. And so this is what the French called the French Republican, the Republican front. That's what in political science literature we call the cordon sanitary, like a sanitary cordon, where voters and parties sort of allow to prevent an extremist formation like the national rally to perform. And in these election, despite the fact that the far right did not succeed in winning power, as they they seemed in the position to do 10 days ago, the national Republican front did not operate that well because it scored a historical result. I mean, they have 130, 135 MPs. They are very, very strong presence in parliament. And they have succeeded in winning most of their seats in bipolar configurations, which means that they succeed in convincing even more voters in a way to vote for them in the seats where they contested. But the result is, so in the second round, the left did very well, much better than expected. Why? Because the French left has been hopelessly divided and fragmented over the past few years. Emmanuel Macron himself emerged from the ranks of the left. It's sort of hard to remember now, but he used to be a socialist, but left as part. - People think of him as just the old school centrist and forget that point. - No, but that's true, but I mean, historically, he emerged through, you know, the socialist party. And in the left, you know, became more and more fragmented as Emmanuel Macron was rising in national politics. And so the first surprise of this election was the ability of the left to coalesce, to form a new popular France in record time, to sort of put aside their differences, which are real between the far left, between the the communist, between Jean-Luc Melanchon's France and both party, the French socialist, and a larger number of really small local political formation. So this is a group of 25 political parties, three of them, three, four, three or four of them major got together. And obviously, once you remove part of the fragmentation on the left side, they're bound to perform better, right? Because their candidates are not sort of cutting each other as they used to in previous elections. So that sort of account for their performance. As far as the center goes, I mean, nobody knows really what objective did Emmanuel Macron really pursue, but I mean, the way a lot of people have put it in France is that after dissolving the assembly, he dissolves his own political camp. He dissolves his own political party. So they score their worst performance ever since Emmanuel Macron has become president. And as a result, you have, and because also the right is also a bit fragmented, you have these three blocks left center and a little residual right and end of our right. So four blocks really where no one really has a majority, right? And the question is, how is France going to govern itself when no clear majority can sort of emerge? In order to get a majority in parliament, you need to have at least seven to 10 parties need to agree to work together, which in French politics is really far from being a given. That's interesting and I want to get to the governance part in just a minute, but I want to go to one of your pieces that you wrote after the elections in which you say, quote, "interpreting the results is another victory of the Republican front against the extremes fails to acknowledge the degree of normalization that the far right in France has achieved." End quote, "Help the audience understand like what this normalization looks and feels like in France. And what do you see as sort of the implications of this, right? I know in the piece you had a chart and folks listening in can go and refer to that data that you've shared there as well. But from a substantive point of view, like I know, you know, at least as a loose follower reading the economists from Bloomberg and stuff like kind of see, okay, anti-immigration, Islamophobic, hints of anti-Semitism as well. Marie Le Pen's father was anti-Semitic and known as that as well. But help us understand and add color to what this normalization is all about. Yeah, so to understand that, I mean, we need to go back in time a little bit. There's a really long history of the far right in France. I mean, you can trace it back to the French counter-revolution, the growth and the rise of anti-Semitism to the 19th century. And basically the sustenance of political movement that were always against democracy, against the French Republic, against parliament, who were always, you know, seeking authority incarnated by a strong leader. You can go back also that translates, you know, to a French brand of fascism that eventually, you know, becomes the vichy regime during the war. And so you have a long continuous thread of far right political thought and far right politics in France over a long period of time, but not to draw too long of a history. Different far right in France emerged and come together in the '70s around a single label. And that was in around the figure of Jean-Marie Le Pen. And so Jean-Marie Le Pen emerges as the leading figure of the far right from, you know, the mid '70s onwards. And it becomes some sort of the bogeyman of, you know, French politics articulating a reactionary discourse, a nationalist discourse, racist, anti-semitic, and so forth. And even though institutions, the rules of the games, party politics, the electoral system, for a long time keep him at bay at a distance, the far right manages to increase its vote share election after election. And that creates the temptation from other political parties to seek to capture back or to bring back some of the voters that they lose to the far right by appealing to them with the ideas that attracted them towards the far right in the first place. So the way that I've put it in my piece is that what we call normalization of the far right. And that's not just true for France, it's true for the far right everywhere in the world. It's not about the dilution of far right views in politics and discourse in order to make themselves more palatable, even though they are trying. But it's the adoption of far right ideas, thought and discourse and politics by other political parties in a more or less diluted form and sometimes not so diluted. And so in French politics, as French politics has always been strongly polarized between the left and the right, as the right was sort of getting in a weakened post 1980s, it had a temptation to sort of flirt with ideas of the far right. So leaders from the mainstream right would say things like the national front or the national rally raises the right questions, but they have the wrong answers. We have the right answers, right? But it would adopt the themes that within the electorate would actually favor the far right. Security, order, immigration, of course, these are the security and immigration, of course, the big two items. But also national preference or protectionism, economic protection, distrust for European institutions, an opposition to the principle, the idea of European integration and so forth. And so you see a diffusion of these ideas which were purported by the far right, adopted by mainstream parties, more so from the right and the center right, but gradually by the center as well. By the way, what we call the center, it's actually very hard to define as a political space because the attempt of doing a synthesis of foreign, of the left and the right, you end up not producing something that has an identity of its own and in effect. And that's something we've seen with centrist politics worldwide. It tends to me more a facade, that sort of obfuscate right-wing politics, right? I mean, centrist are usually right-wingers who do not want to be called as such, right? And so we've seen-- - They just tend to have better manners than the right and feel a bit your touchy-feely about being called what they actually are. - Yeah, well, they are all kind of well-banded, right? I mean, if you look at French politicians almost from every side, except maybe the communist and the far left, I mean, they all wear the same blue suits and same sort of short hair, the same, you know, fashion, I mean, in appearance it's sort of, you know, difficult to, you know, sew them from one another. But yeah, you're right. I mean, they try to present themselves as more moderate, as more reasonable. But again, the temptations to pursue policies that they think will sort of draw back voters who had sort of leaned towards, the right or towards the far right is very much there. And I mean, it's striking that, you know, no one seems to be learning from history because that's also how, you know, fascist movement came to power in the first place. They were actually called on to power ultimately by, you know, centrist power was the case in Germany. But also it's not effective as an electoral strategy. There's an old saying that, you know, voters will always prefer the original to the copy. And so if you are swayed or moved by matters of immigration or security, if you feel unsafe, if you feel that you're losing, you know, any sense of cultural identity and that your country is being invaded, you're going to go towards the party that speaks the strongest about it and not the moderate version of it. And so normalization to go back to your question has basically been the slow building up of the capacity of the far right to become agenda setting. Even though they were not in a position to access power because institution and sort of in the rules of the game sort of kept them apart, they kept them, you know, they marginalized them. They build up their ability to define the terms around which elections are forced in a way, forcing parties to sort of respond to the issues that they raise. And this, of course, has, you know, really deep consequences. I mean, I remember when Nicolas Sarkozy was president, there was a very clear right-wing shift after the Shehakiers, which was somewhat more centrist, center-right and moderate. And so Nicolas Sarkozy really sought to distinguish himself by being far more right-wing than his predecessor. And that had the effect of liberating a certain kind of discourse and emboldening people to also act upon their resentment or anger. And so France has seen an increase of acts of antisemitism, definitely an increase of Islamophobia, the rise of xenophobia generally speaking against migrant of, you know, all variety, but you know, Muslim, or Muslim origin, you know, migration, even even more so. And that has in turn encouraged parties to seek to respond to these growing expressions of anger and resentment, right? And so the very definition of French secularism, for example, which was, after all, a pragmatic, you know, tool to ensure freedom of religions and freedom from religions, for those who didn't, you know, care to be religious, became more nomatively charged notion against the idea of religion and against visible religious minorities, right? And so we've seen, you know, legislations, which in the, were taken in the name of protecting France's culture, France's identity, France's republican egalitarian secular model, but which had for effect to target and stigmatize, or stigmatize if not target directly, specific segments of the population, which often happen, you know, to be Muslims. And so the bokeh band, of course, and then the slew of legislations that, you know, sort of surrounds that is an example. So these ideas, you know, we come from the far right, but they are adopted by mainstream parties in government who turn them into legislation. It polarizes voters in return and in a way, parties feel incentivized to, you know, oh, but we need, this is what people want, we need to respond to it, right? While in effect, it's largely created by parties themselves. - That's very interesting. And again, it's like something we see all over the world, right, that this idea that you can go to the right of the right, and I'm like, that doesn't really work. As you said, people want the original, and that's what they care for. And the moment you give a little bit, the other side knows it's winning, and so it'll push even harder for the next round. So that's interesting to see that that's what's happening in France as well. I wanna now come to the governance part of this, right? Again, a lot of the coverage has been that, you know, how is Macron gonna govern now? The French president still has a lot of authority and power, but Parliament still plays a key role. You wrote in your piece that coalitions are foreign to France's political culture and vocabulary. And again, like, my view, as you were explaining early, the makeup of Parliament was, okay, if you're Macron, you can pick a couple of the left here and there, and like sort of get the six, seven party majority that you need. But again, would love for you to explain like, what is the history behind this political culture that doesn't like coalitions? And again, how do you see this playing out in the next eight, 10, 12 months, given everything that's going on in Europe? You know, US has an election coming up as well. And so a lot of volatility on the European continent, geopolitically foreign policy-wise economically, and how does that play in the French context today? - Right, so first, I think I can speak about coalition and the lack of culture of coalition in France with a certain degree of authority as a Belgian. I mean, Belgium was created in 1831 and we've never had anything else than coalition government. So I think I mean, well positioned to sort of make that statement, but the French system has always been very polarized and institutions are built around the idea that one party, one tendency, one camp should have a majority. First, it's a presidential system, right? It's not a parliamentary republic. It's a presidential system. The president is clothed with immense powers in a way the French presidency is more powerful institutionally speaking than even the US presidency. The US is a more powerful country, but that's a separate question. So in terms of power, checks and balances and so forth. And so it usually follows that whenever a president is elected, he obtains one way or another a parliamentary majority to back him. And if not, it means that someone else has a majority in which there is a cohabitation, right? Which happened on three occasions in the past. What French institutions were not very well designed for is a fragmentation of the party system where no one has the majority. And this is the situation in which France has been since 2022, because 2017, first mandate of Emmanuel Macron, he wins a majority after getting elected president, but he loses his majority in 2022. And so he has the power to nominate the prime minister. There's no rule in France that the prime minister should belong to the first party in parliament. That's what the left would like to argue now, but there's no rule as such in the books. And so what Emmanuel Macron has been doing or saying is, well, we're not going to have a coalition government, but you're going to support my minority government because if you don't do that, it's chaos because no one else can really form the government. So there's an element of black made here if you want. And then we are going to build alliances in coalition, build by build, project by project in but through discussion in parliament. And what was expected, you know, happened is that these discussions did not go in over very well because of these deep differences, the law on immigration, security laws, a whole slew of, you know, legislative, the pension bill, the pension reform, you know, things like that. So they were bound to, you know, profoundly disagree. And so the French institution enables the president, enables the government, in fact, to sort of bypass parliament. There's a clause in the constitution, 49 by three, that enables the government to push through a legislation bypass parliament when there's no majority to support it. And it was meant to be in really exceptional circumstances and long story short, it's been completely routinized, right? And so the way parliamentarian themselves put it is that parliament has been really brutalized, you know, over the last two years by a minority government which we stayed in power for fear of, you know, creating chaos if the government fell, in absence of an alternative. And at the same time, a minority government has sort of pushed legislation without really debate, without discussion, without compromise, without, so against what, you know, a spirit of coalition would require. A coalition system, a proper coalition system requires parties that have different views to dilute them somewhat to come with, you know, a reason sort of negotiated settlement. Policy outcomes or legislative outcomes that may not be satisfactory completely for everyone, but, you know, where everyone can find something, you know, for themselves or for their support basis. But that's really, as I said, foreign to French political culture. And what these elections now in 2024 have done is that they intensify the fragmentation in parliament which makes, you know, this sort of game of aligns around project even more elusive. There's a question which I think is central here, is the question of legitimacy because Emmanuel Macron in a way is the luckiest, you know, political figure in Europe by far because he emerged in national politics as other mainstream parties were declining and actually even broke down in some cases. And so he emerged as the more likely figure to defeat Marine Le Pen in a presidential election which means that for both presidential and legislative elections, a lot of voters who do not support Mr. Macron were brought to vote for him in the second round in order to block Marine Le Pen, right? But when you vote for, so of course it's tactical voting. They don't vote in favor necessarily of Mr. Macron where they vote, this is for him in order to oppose the other candidate. But the problem is that it leads to the building of elusive majorities, right? Because Mr. Macron is elected with 50% plus of the votes but these are not votes of support for his program, for his project, for his agenda. But that's how he chooses to interpret it. Like what are you saying? I've been elected, this is what's my project. No, I'm implementing my project. What could be, you know, less democratic than that. What could be more democratic than that, right? And so the notion of mandate gets completely blurred because of this transfer of all this tactical voting, right? And so as I said, it should create an obligation from those elected in those circumstances to at least make the effort of reaching out to the people who voted for them, not through adhesion to their program but for tactical consideration. But that's not in the personality of Mr. Macron at all. He's a lonely leader. He centralizes power. He marginalized even his own cabinet. He surrounds himself with a show small number of very young dedicated advisor about my home on a daily basis. And so he's not in a power sharing mode. And that's the key challenge that we have is how do we ensure that power gets distributed, right? As I wrote in another piece, political centralization divides countries because it's necessarily, you know, supporters and opponents, right? It also generates anger, dissatisfaction, resentment in the political system in the political class because, you know, even your position doesn't really have a role to play. And even the partners find themselves marginalized. I mean, the very fact that the dissolution was decided by the president, maybe three advisors at the cabinet. - The prime minister did not know, right? - I mean, he's not, no, and made that very clear. Yeah, well, in a sense, wasn't my idea. - Yeah. - And I have to support it, but not my idea. And I mean, this, you have a clash between the necessity of finding working arrangements between parties that not only oppose one another, but also detest one another. There's a degree of acrimany in French politics that's really, that has increased and intensified over the years. So you have a contrast between the necessity of finding these arrangements and a political, a history of political culture that pushes towards centralization and a current incumbent president who is perhaps more centralizing than most of his recent predecessors. - If I interrupt like an ask you, like a follow-up on something you said, right? There's a degree of acrimany among these people. Like, can you help us understand like what is causing this? Again, if I look at sort of like, let's say, the United States, right? The acrimany between the Democrats and Republicans right now, essentially is that the Democrats see one party, the Republicans as the party of interaction as the party of January 6, as the party that doesn't want to hold a convicted felon to account. And the Republicans see the Democrats as the party that essentially is, you know, allowing anybody to come into America and change the demographics of the country and the party of the status quo and the elite media and the elite lawyers and things like that, right? That's really the personalization of acrimany between the two sides broadly speaking. What is driving this in France? - So the same thing that drives it in the US or other traditionally bipolar system, there's no expectation that these two parties will ever govern together. Therefore, there's no incentives to try to find some common ground and nurture it. Instead, you need to play out the differences in the opposition in order to distinguish yourself and try to convince voters to lean towards your direction. And so there's no expectation that the left and the right in France would ever govern together. Either it's a majority or it's a cohabitation, but so therefore there's no incentive to even try or learn, right? To find common language, to find common ground. And it is very, very difficult, right? When you're a hard-bend, you know, limiting immigration as much as possible. And then when you have a more humane approach on the other hand, I mean, how do you conciliate that? It's very difficult, right? Obviously. But the way I put it is that the fact that there's no practice or expenditure or expectations of sort of working together, it pushes parties also to adopt what I call maximalist positions, right? And so the day after the results, every party said, well, we have a claim to power. There cannot be an arrangement that exclude us, but we're going to implement or program in its entirety. We're not going to compromise on that. That doesn't work. That's not how God is, that's not how God is. - By definition, it cannot work, yeah. - Exactly. - Interesting. Okay, so we have this situation, okay, that there will be likely chaos, likely conflict Macron once to run a minority government. And obviously, we'll see how he manages to push things through parliament. But one thing that stood out to me also, sort of in the visuals, right? And I want to come to my last question here, was there was the French flag, there was the Palestinian flag. Gaza sort of featured a lot on the left. They made the statement, one of the leaders of the left made the statement that parliament should move towards recognizing the Palestinian state very quickly. So clearly, a divide already on foreign policy, right? Something, a major topic as a war in Gaza is already there. That sort of like captured my attention in terms of, okay, what this will be like. But can you help us understand, sort of from the left's point of view, like what is that maximalist agenda that they're seeking to push for, given that they are the largest junk in parliament? And what is it that they will, sort of you think, or anticipate where, you know, despite the rhetoric of the entire agenda wanting to be implemented, like where is it that they likely will move first in terms of their priorities? - So first, let me sort of characterize thing in a rather simplistic way. What the right wants is to keep the system as it is. What the center wants is to tweak it a little bit to make it more sustainable and less divisive. What the left wants is to change the system. It's a pretty simplistic way of looking at things, but that's because it helps to actually understand, you know, the differences of approaches. And so the left, for example, wants a complete overhaul of, you know, fiscality. It wants to tax the rich. It wants to increase guaranteed minimum wages. It wants to not only protect the social welfare apparatus, but it wants to increase it, to increase benefits, to beneficiaries. It wants an overhaul of the government's environmental policy or like thereof. It holds a very clear position with regard to the conflict in Gaza. It sides, you know, very, very clearly, you know, on the sides of the Palestinian, it calls with, you know, the genocide for what it is. And it condens- - If I made her up, Macron apparently complained to Netanyahu that his ministers are intervening in the election on the right side because of the other position. - Yeah, no, that's right. I mean, there's a principle of non-interference in each other's domestic politics, which is, I mean, it's kind of an old notion because, you know, everybody's commenting on everything and you cannot call what's happening in Gaza domestic, it's not domestic politics in any case. But yes, it's a separate question, but it's quite striking how the Israeli right and far right are now siding with the parties that are the inheritors of, you know, the political movement that led to fascism and Nazism. I mean, it's an extraordinary- - Victor Orban is there buddy and Naz and Donald Trump, which is quite interesting. - Victor Orban and Donald Trump and so, of course. So there's a separate issue about the transnationalization of the far right, which create these sort of weird alliances. But no, to go back to you, to go back to your question. So there are profound differences, you know, between parties in France, they correspond to old political divisions. There's an old left-right that despite Mr. Macron's efforts to sort of make it irrelevant and imposing itself at the center has not disappeared. And it manifests itself on a range of issues, including, you know, foreign affairs, you know, issues such as, you know, conflict in the Middle East and other questions as way. But it's one thing to hold views and positions and make decorations of principles. It's the business of governing on a day-to-day basis is a different things, it's a different thing, right? So if you look at Belgium, for example, Belgium was one of the early European countries to actually condemn Israel for its actions in the Gaza Strip. And, but it still has, you know, a coalition government within which, you know, there are also diverging views. But through discussion, through, you know, they've actually succeeded in producing a coherent, cohesive view, which they've made known to the world and which was, you know, Crevin. In this case, you know, was critical of Israel, right? In France, given the culture of, you know, the ideological rift between parties, it's much, much more difficult to achieve that. - Yeah, so something that we should all be watching, I guess, in addition to, at least for me in Washington, looking into the November elections and every day there's a new story related to the future of Joe Biden and the split between the Democrats itself, perhaps need to keep a closer eye on Paris as well and what happens in France moving forward given the dynamics that you've explained over the course of the last half hour or so. Again, thank you so much. This was very, very insightful. And again, I don't think I personally follow French politics a lot, but this was an interesting moment in terms of the headlines. And I'm sure the audience enjoyed the discussion as well. So thank you for taking out the time. I see a big collection of books behind you. And this is always my last question to my guests. What are two or three books you would recommend to the audience? - So, well, precisely on the question of the far right, which is a cause that I teach at Amherst with a colleague historian. There's a short book by the US-based for Dutch political scientist, Cass Middle, called the far right today. It was published four or five years ago, but it's very succinct and extremely effective at understanding the nature, the origin, the content of the far right, but it also addresses the question of what sort of response are effective or not effective against the far right and so forth. It's a very, very useful accessible book on the topic. Otherwise, there's a number of books that have been published, of course, on French politics. I'm thinking, when in English, I'm thinking about, you know, James Shields, for example, the extreme right in France, from Petain-Toulopaine. This is very useful to see the continuity in the far right. Despite the claim that the far right transformed itself, that they've normalized themselves and so forth. There is a very deep political, sociological continuity within that party that actually traces back to World War II, and I would argue, even before. One of the best specialists of the far right in France is Nona Meyer. Most of our publications are in French, but there's a number of articles that are accessible in English on the topic. So, yeah, this would be a good place to start. - Thank you so much for these recommendations. I'll definitely check them out, starting with the far right today, 'cause I was looking for a recommendation on this topic. So, appreciate you sharing that. And again, thank you for your time and would love to have you on again. This time you talk about Indian politics where we'll be in touch and looking forward to that conversation in the future, but in the meantime, have a great day. Thank you. - Now you too. Bye-bye. 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