The Downballot: French snap elections preview (transcript)

Momentous elections are taking place in just days in France, so we've brought Bolts editor-in-chief Daniel Nichanian on this week's episode of "The Downballot" to give us the complete picture. Nichanian deciphers President Emmanuel Macron's opaque rationale for calling snap elections despite his party's grim standing in the polls and explains why, for the first time ever, the longstanding firewall between the center-right and the far right has finally collapsed—and could usher in the most extreme government that America's oldest ally has seen since the Vichy regime.

Co-hosts David Nir and David Beard also give due attention to elections on this side of the Atlantic, with a rundown of Tuesday's primaries. They discuss why it's a mistake to conclude that AIPAC's massive spending was the chief driver of Jamaal Bowman's fall, then delve into the not one, not two, but three different GOP primaries that saw Trump-backed candidates all lose.

To all of our loyal listeners, "The Downballot" will be taking off next week for the Fourth of July, but we'll be back in two weeks' time with a new episode! Click here to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform.

David Beard: Hello and welcome. I'm David Beard, contributing editor for Daily Kos Elections.

David Nir: And I'm David Nir, political director of Daily Kos. "The Dowballot" is a weekly podcast dedicated to the many elections that take place below the presidency, from Senate to city council. You can subscribe to "The Downballot" wherever you listen to podcasts to make sure you never miss an episode.

Beard: Now we've got a jam-packed episode today, don't we?

Nir: We do indeed. Before we take a break for July 4th, we are talking about Tuesday's primaries, including the big race in New York's 16th district. That has been the topic of tons of conversation. But we're also talking about a whole bunch of primaries that saw Donald Trump endorsees lose, amazingly enough.

Then for our deep dive, we are talking with the editor-in-chief of Pulse Magazine, Daniel Nichanian, about the French elections that are coming up this Sunday. We have a jam-packed episode, so let's get rolling.

Nir: Well, primary season is about to go on a month-long hiatus, but before we do, we had a big, big primary night on Tuesday night in several states, including New York, my home state, where we are going to start. And of course, the race that was on everybody's tongues, that has been the focus of so much attention for so so so many months, was the Democratic primary in New York's 16th congressional district, located in the Bronx and mostly in Westchester County, just north of New York City. There, Westchester County Executive George Latimer defeated Congressman Jamaal Bowman, currently leading on Wednesday afternoon by a 58-42 margin.

There are still some votes outstanding — mostly in Westchester, where Latimer of course did his best, so that margin could still increase. This wound up being the most expensive House primary in American history to date, and as a result, a ton of the commentary has focused on the role of AIPAC, the hawkish pro-Israel group that spent heavily — we are talking more than $15 million — to help Latimer defeat Bowman chiefly because of Bowman's stance on Israel and the current war in Gaza. But I think it would be a huge mistake to conclude that Bowman lost simply or even chiefly because of AIPAC and their heavy spending.

There are a number of Democratic members of Congress with views similar to Bowman's who have been outspoken the way Bowman has in terms of his criticisms of Israel, but AIPAC and their allies haven't gone after all of them. In fact, just a couple of months ago, Congresswoman Summer Lee, who represents a blue district in Pittsburgh and is very much an ally of Jamaal Bowman… AIPAC and co. decided to pretty much leave her alone because, by their own admission, they thought that Summer Lee wasn't capable of being defeated in a Democratic primary.

They targeted Bowman because of his weaknesses as a candidate that made him vulnerable to a challenge, especially from someone as well-liked and as well-situated as Latimer. We've got to be blunt here: Bowman made a lot of mistakes as a sitting member of Congress that most of his colleagues simply haven't made or wouldn't make. He repeatedly voted, ostensibly from the left, against major Biden administration priorities, including the bipartisan infrastructure bill. That wound up being a huge topic in ads.

There was that extremely weird incident that I still don't fully understand of him falsely pulling this fire alarm on Capitol Hill that he wound up pleading guilty to a misdemeanor over. That was just really strange behavior that also made it into ads. Then there was this flirtation with conspiracy theories on his YouTube channel, where he followed all kinds of nutter fringe accounts, and his own blog from 10 years ago where he wrote poetry expressing some kind of support for 9/11 conspiracy theories.

This guy was well outside the mainstream and also, he had never been vetted thoroughly, it seems. He came to Congress by defeating an incumbent, Eliot Engel, in a Democratic primary four years ago, and Engel was a longtime member of Congress. It seemed like he was entrenched and was completely unused to facing a competitive campaign, and he didn't do the digging into Bowman that he could have and should have done at the time. This stuff only came up years later, and it's really important to note that AIPAC and Latimer focused their ads on all of these things that I just mentioned and not the Israel stuff.

Now, there are some people who almost view that as sneaky or underhanded: "Oh, well, they really care about Israel, but their ads weren't about Israel." But this happens in politics all the time. In fact, we've talked about it on the show before, including quite recently.

We have seen, for instance, groups focused on the environment talk about things like the price of insulin in ads. Candidates and third-party groups run ads on the topics that they think are going to be most effective, and that is simply how politics is played, and that's smart politics. And you don't wind up with 42% in a primary as an incumbent unless you have some pretty serious flaws as a candidate. And we are going to see most of the members of the so-called Squad win easily or even win without an opponent in Democratic primaries this year.

But the ones who have faced or are going to face really serious challenges, and the main person on my mind with a race coming up is Cori Bush in Missouri, are those who have not done the normal standard work of politics, of engaging with your constituents, of really caring about your district, of putting your district first and not national politics. That in my mind is the story of Bowman's loss, and I think to conclude anything else would represent a huge mistake and would be a total misunderstanding of what went down on Tuesday night in Westchester and the Bronx.

Beard: Yeah, I think part of it is that it benefits everyone who's having this broader debate within the Democratic Party over in Israel and Gaza to assign everything in this primary to that issue because, obviously, folks who are supporting Latimer want to use this as proof that they are correct about everything in terms of Democratic politics because Latimer won. And then a lot of people, even who are on the Bowman side who obviously wanted Bowman to win, are taking Bowman's loss as an opportunity to be like, oh, Bowman lost because AIPAC spent $15 million against him. And so the problem is AIPAC spent all this money funded by Republicans to go after people with his position. And so it benefits everyone for that to be the story that comes out of it, but I think you're right that it's a lot more complicated than that.

Obviously, that was one among many issues that I'm sure affected voters, and I'm sure that there were voters in the district who voted largely because of that issue. But as you said, Bowman had a lot of other weaknesses that a lot of other voters probably voted on as well. I think the strength of a candidate is so important in these types of primaries, and we have seen other members of Congress, who have basically the exact same position on Israel and Gaza as Bowman, and have been fine in primaries because they don't have those other weaknesses that would open themselves up to a loss.

And I think also, if you just look back in his history, when he got a slightly new district in 2022 that I believe had more of Westchester County than his first win in 2020, he only got 54% of the vote in his 2022 primary against not particularly notable candidates, not somebody like the Westchester County leader like Latimer was. And so he was clearly weak and somebody ripe for being primaried two years ago. And so the fact that this happened should not necessarily be a surprise even if, of course, the war in Gaza and all of this and all the money that got spent added another layer to a primary that probably would've happened anyway.

Nir: Yeah. And you allude to a really good point. Latimer was probably the perfect recruit for this race. He had won countywide in this very populous county, he was quite popular. There are multiple reports about his excellent skills as a retail campaigner, the kind of guy who knows everybody's name when he walks into a room at a political event.

He had some missteps; he definitely put his foot in his mouth on occasion. There's no such thing as a perfect candidate. But as you said, Beard, in a primary, candidate quality and familiarity with a candidate, when you're dealing with a much smaller electorate, really, really matters. And just to make one more point about the money in this race, we know that money alone can never win an election.

If that were true, then Mitch McConnell would've lost his last race for the Senate. Lindsey Graham would've lost because the Democratic candidates that they faced raised billions of dollars and outraised the incumbents. And we'd also see self-funders win all the time. If money were everything, David Trone would've crushed Angela Alsobrooks.

Money is important, but all that money does in politics is get you in the game. It never can win the game for you. And this game was won by a strong candidate in George Latimer, and it was lost by a flawed candidate in Jamaal Bowman.

Beard: Well, that's enough about that race because we have so many other races to get through during our weekly hits. So we're going to move on to South Carolina, which had its run-offs for races that did not have a winner two weeks ago, and the one big race that we want to talk about is South Carolina's 3rd district and the Republican primary. This is an open seat, and in this race, we saw Trump's candidate, Pastor Mark Burns very narrowly lose, and it's a prize that we'll see again and again actually as we go through these races tonight.

He narrowly lost 51-49 to the candidate endorsed by Governor Henry McMaster, Air National Guard Lieutenant Colonel Sheri Biggs. So she is now on a glide path to Congress; it's a very Republican seat. Obviously she's very conservative; she will, I'm sure, cozy up to Trump and get off copacetic with him very quickly. But she is not a total crazy insane person like, as we've talked about previously, Mark Burns is, so this is probably, on the whole, good news.

Nir: Yeah, Burns is the guy Downballot listeners might recall, who called for the execution of Mitch McConnell and his state's senior Senator, Lindsey Graham, on the grounds of treason. The guy is as crazy and unhinged and violent, and frankly, scary as they come in the GOP. And I'm not going to say that I'm happy that Sheri Biggs won, but I am glad that Mark Burns lost. I know that I've said that I think that the GOP ultimately will embrace a guy like Burns as mainstream probably in just a few years, but I'm glad that that day is not today. The other thing I want to note, Beard, is that you expect Sheri Biggs to get all copacetic with Trump. Absolutely. A bunch of Trump endorsees lost on Tuesday night, but it was not a defeat for Trumpism.

There were pro-Biggs ads running where McMaster said that she was a pro-Trump candidate. You see this happen a lot in races, where Trump picks a particular favorite, and the other Republicans of the race all try to make it seem like they still have his endorsement anyway. So yeah, Trump was probably at Mar-a-Lago stewing Tuesday night, watching all these terrible candidates go down to defeat and probably screaming at his staff who told him that he should endorse them. But you know what, Donald? You're going to be just fine here. All these other winners are going to be totally happy to bend the knee for you.

Beard: One of the states we're going to talk about has a slight difference in its pro versus anti-Trump wing, which is Utah, which we'll get to at the end of the weekly hits. But by and large in the other 49 states, what you see is candidates who don't get Trump's endorsement try to pretend like they got Trump's endorsement. They run ads about how great they and Trump are together. They'll tout their conservative bona fides and anybody close to Trump that they could get allies or endorsements from. It's all part of the same competition to try to convince people that you're close enough to Trump, that you can vote for this candidate even if that person didn't get the endorsement. So it's really six of one, half a dozen of the other.

Nir: Yeah, and that's a perfect jumping-off point to move out west to Colorado, which also had primaries on Tuesday night. In the open 5th congressional district — a very red seat — conservative radio host Jeff Crank, crushed state party chair Dave Williams, by a 65-35 margin for the nod to replace retiring Congressman Doug Lamborn, who had also endorsed Crank.

That was actually interesting because 20 years ago, Crank had tried to unseat Lamborn in the Republican primary, but they ultimately made friends and it seems like Lamborn's endorsement mattered, at least to some extent. But the interesting thing here is that Trump had endorsed Dave Williams, the state GOP chair, who wound up getting completely crushed. And the really pathetic thing here is not just that the Trump guy lost, but he was chair of the state GOP. He had used official state Republican Party resources to promote his campaign.

This is also the maniac who called for the burning of pride flags, and it actually got him upbraided by a bunch of other Republican officials. But the state GOP in Colorado is so enfeebled. The Colorado GOP recently changed its rules to allow the state party to take sides in Republican primaries and on Tuesday night, according to one tally, 14 of the 18 candidates that the state GOP backed lost, and that included their state party chair. When I was first coming up in politics, Colorado was a Republican-leaning state. This is a state that went for George W. Bush, and then it became a swing state, and now it feels really reliably blue in part because the state party is just so crazy and so ineffectual.

Beard: Yeah. All of that is true, and yet I can't get past the fact that the establishment candidate's last name is Crank, because I just feel like the crazy person's last name should be Crank, and the establishment candidate should be something like Dave Williams, just very anodyne name. So every time I've been reading this I'm like, wait, Jeff Crank is the normal one? Relatively, of course, we're still talking about right-wing Republicans here. But I'll get used to it, Trump will get used to it. I'm sure he and Jeff Crank will come together. Mike Johnson supported Crank, so he's going to I'm sure facilitate him getting good. So we shouldn't expect any anti-Trumpism out of any of this, but probably on the whole, good that Dave Williams isn't going to be in Congress, just like it's good that Mark Burns isn't going to be in Congress.

Nir: David Beard with the very important name-based commentary on Republican candidates. Totally agree. Totally agree.

Beard: Yeah, I've gotten it enough. Enough people have told me that I should grow a beard, that I can tell Jeff Crank that he should be a crank. Now in Colorado, we actually also had a special election to fill out the final six months of Republican, Ken Buck's term in CO-04. Now, the Republican former Parker mayor, Greg Lopez, won that election pretty handily. He defeated former congressional staffer Trisha Calvarese, 58-35. Now that's a slight underperformance, but pretty close to what the 2020 result in this seat was. Trump took this seat 58% to 39%.

But it's important to note that the Republicans had a competitive primary for this open seat for the next Congress, which we'll talk about in a minute. That definitely drove turnout on their side. You could see from the partisan turnout statistics that Republicans had a really good turnout, which I think definitely is a factor in why the GOP slightly overperformed in this special election.

Nir: Yeah, Lopez will have a very short tenure in Congress because he didn't run for the full term. That GOP primary was won by none other than Lauren Boebert, who, of course, Downballot listeners well know, swapped districts. She went from western Colorado to eastern Colorado because CO-04 is much more conservative than CO-03 where she almost lost in 2022. She won her primary pretty handily on Tuesday night. She beat her nearest opponent by a 43-14 margin in a six-way race. 43% for an incumbent, winning with a plurality, is pretty sucky in the abstract, but here we have this district-hopping congresswoman with all kinds of flaws who had almost no ties to the new district that she was trying to run for, but she benefited from what we often referred to as the 'crabs in the bucket' problem. There was no single anti-Boebert candidate who emerged.

Had one emerged, it does seem like she could have lost because she didn't get a majority after all, and all of those Republicans really seemed to be pissed at her because of the fact that she was just parachuting into this district and had no connection to it whatsoever. But ultimately, she had Trump's endorsement, she had far more money than anyone else, and she locked up that nomination. And so now she is very likely to win a full term against Calvarese in November. But of course, it was Boebert who had that special Boebert magic and managed to turn a solidly red district into a total toss-up in 2022.

Like I said, CO-04 is way redder than CO-03. It's like a Trump +20 margin instead of a Trump +8 margin. It would be quite something if even Lauren Boebert could screw this up, but even though we didn't see any kind of Democratic overperformance in the special election on Tuesday night, I would not be at all surprised to see Calvarese overperform in November here.

Beard: Yeah, I definitely can imagine an overperformance. It would absolutely be shocking to get anywhere close to turning it into competitive because, like you said, the seat is just so red compared to her former seat, but that's what Boebert wanted. She wanted a safe seat so she could do her antics and not have to worry about the voters in her district punishing her at the general election time, and now she more than likely won't have to.

Now, for the last state that we want to hit, it's one I mentioned previously, that's Utah, where you do occasionally see some at least Trump skeptical, maybe, we'll say, Trump-distancing, on occasion. Obviously, Mitt Romney, the outgoing senator there, has been no fan of Trump in recent years.

Representative John Curtis, who's pretty close to the establishment in Utah, comfortably won the Republican nomination. He's currently on 51%, with his closest competition, Riverton Mayor, Trent Staggs, who got Trump's endorsement, on just 30%. Now we're talking relatively small degrees of distance here. Curtis is not going to come out in opposition to Trump or anything like that. I'm sure he said that he's going to vote for Trump in the general election, but he's certainly more establishment-minded than the more Trumpist candidates that we've seen in Utah and in these other states where it's often a Trumpist candidate who got Trump's endorsement against a Trumpist candidate who didn't get Trump's endorsement.

Nir: Yeah. Interestingly, before the election of those three races that Trump endorsed in, he only attacked one of the ultimate winners, and it wasn't Curtis. He actually went after Crank, the guy who crushed the state party chair, Dave Williams. So yeah, it's going to be all kisses and hugs eventually, there's no doubt about that. One final race was the GOP primary for governor where incumbent, Spencer Cox, won a narrower-than-expected victory against far-right state representative, Phil Lyman. As of Wednesday afternoon, he was up just 57-43. Lyman had actually won at the state GOP Convention a couple of months ago. He won by a pretty big margin. And that convention can affect ballot access. Cox was never in danger of not making it on the ballot, but in the past, those convention votes usually did not say a whole lot about how the primary would go down. In 2016 for example, then-incumbent Republican Governor Gary Herbert also lost at the GOP Convention by a 55-44 margin. But two months later, he absolutely crushed it in the primary. He beat his opponent 72 to 28.

This time, Cox was absolutely destroyed at the convention. He lost 68 to 32, and he only defeated Lyman by about a 14 or 15-point margin. This is obviously a small sample size, but it seems to me that we are seeing less and less divergence between the preferences of convention delegates and primary voters. And I think that at a certain point, maybe those conventions will be predictive and that the dog will catch the car, and some nominally mainstream Republican incumbent, even a governor in Utah, is going to find themselves losing a primary. And man, a governor losing a primary would just be a wild thing to see. That is not something that happens often.

Beard: Yeah, we've seen in the past eight years, if you go back to Utah's strong anti-Trump strain that occurred when he first came on the scene and became the Republican nominee for president, it's gotten weaker and weaker. It's still got strength, particularly compared to the other 49 states. It's gotten weaker and Trumpism has gotten stronger as the years have gone on, and I think we should just expect that to continue until Trumpism takes over the Utah Republican Party completely.

Nir: Well, that does it for our weekly hits. Coming up on our deep dive, we are talking with the editor-in-chief of Bolts Magazine, Daniel Nichanian, about the French elections that are coming up this Sunday. It is a fascinating discussion about a hugely consequential set of elections that could see the far-right sweep into power for the first time in an incredibly long time. Please stick with us after the break.

Nir: Joining us today on "The Downballot" is Daniel Nichanian, who is the founder and editor-in-chief of Bolts Magazine. Now, Bolts is devoted to US elections, specifically around the areas of criminal justice and voting rights. But Daniel, who you may better know as Taniel on Twitter, is also a devotee of French elections. So we are going to be talking about the elections in France on this episode of "The Downballot." Daniel, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Daniel Nichanian: It's really great to be back.

Nir: Now, I promise Daniel, we definitely will get to some US justice-slash-voting rights-related stuff at the end of this segment, but we have got to dive right into France. So I would love it if you could give our listeners a rundown on the state of French politics right before this snap election was called by the President.

Nichanian: So I've been getting a lot of questions over the last two weeks from people in the U.S. What is going on? And first of all, if you're confused, a lot of people in France are confused as well. The prime minister of the country, Gabriel Attal, reportedly did not know that elections were going to be called until an hour before they were called. So pretty much everyone is as confused as you are right now.

So as of roughly two and a half weeks ago, France was having EU elections — elections for the parliament of the EU, of the European Union — and there were no national elections planned for who would govern France until 2027. So there are three more years before either an election for the presidential race — where right now the President is Emmanuel Macron — or elections for the National Assembly, which is roughly the equivalent of the U.S. House but just much more important; it's the much more important of the two bodies of the French Parliament.

And on the night of the EU elections, the far right got a very, very strong score. It got 33%, I believe, of the vote in EU elections, which was very high and immediately caused a lot of analysis and a lot of commentary about the strength of the far-right in France right now, and that was supposed to be the end of it. That's when people were going to go home. And suddenly, Emmanuel Macron came on TV around 9 PM, French Time, on Sunday night of the election, and announced that he was calling snap elections to reelect the members of the parliament, to elect the members of the National Assembly. Again, this seems to have been a shock decision.

He informed his own cabinet whose jobs he was effectively putting in huge jeopardy just an hour before calling for these elections. And the elections are happening already in a few days, they're happening on Sunday, so the whole campaign is going to... The first round is happening on Sunday and then the runoffs are going to happen the following Sunday. So the whole campaign, from the calling of the snap elections to the runoffs, is going to happen over four weeks. And right now it's been pretty chaotic over that time.

Nir: So you mentioned these elections for the European Union parliament. Now they're not unimportant, but the EU parliament has far less influence over policy in France or any member of the European Union. But you're saying there was a barometer for political opinion in France and the EU at large.

Nichanian: Well, yes, but I think that, yes, they are, as in people usually vote in the EU election based on their sentiment about domestic politics because the EU is not necessarily covered; it's an extremely important level of government that shapes a lot of what domestic governments can do, and yet it is not necessarily integrated into how people think about politics and people think about how they vote. And what's very, very interesting and pretty tragic here is that every main party, every EU election, insists on voters. This is not a domestic election, this is not about what's happening in France or whatever country. This is about Brussels: "Think about the EU," that's what the politicians try and say.

It's a way of saying, actually think about the real stakes of the election, don't just punish the domestic government. Now that Emmanuel Macron has decided to create the biggest possible stakes at the national level out of the fact that the far-right did well in the European elections, it's going to be very difficult in the future for anyone to say do not think about national politics when you think of these EU elections because he created the ultimate stake just to get a very important point across. In France, the parliamentary elections which are happening really are super important. Obviously they're important in the US, but they really decide who the government of France is. The cabinet, the prime minister, they all emerge out of the parliamentary elections, not out of the presidential election.

So in a situation where the president doesn't control the majority of the National Assembly, which we can get to is probably what's going to happen, the president becomes a figurehead. The president no longer really matters on domestic affairs mostly, it's a little complicated. So really right now what the French people are deciding isn't just the members of Parliament, it really is who is going to govern the country for the next year to three years.

Beard: Now, for folks who aren't really familiar with French politics at all, can you go back and talk a little bit about Macron and how he became president, and how he relates to both the far-right and the two more traditional left and right-wing parties?

Nichanian: That's such a hard question, though you would think it should be easy. So Macron was appointed minister of finance I believe in 2015 (though the exact exact year I might have off) but in 2015 by a center-left President at the time named François Hollande, who is now back in politics as of a week ago. So Macron emerged then, but Hollande was governing as a center-left president who was really breaking from the left of his party and from the rest of the left-wing parties of France. And there was really a very strong rift there between the center and the left during the Hollande years.

And in 2017, Hollande was extremely unpopular — so unpopular, he didn't even try to run for re-election in 2017. Emmanuel Macron launched his own independent run in 2017; he created his own party and really captured the imagination of people and did very well in the presidential election, aided by a giant scandal that we felt the conservative party that was favored to win at the time. Macron — he became president in 2017 — so he really was in this, "I am neither on the left nor on the right, we should break up the system." He came from the financial sector; he thought of France as a startup. He really had that tech meets finance way of speaking.

Mostly, he took people from both the center-left and the center-right, but clearly quickly started to lean towards the center-right, and most of the most prominent people who he pulled and put in his cabinet were from the center-right. And then, that drifted and drifted more and more. By 2022, Macron was re-elected but then did not manage to have this party get a majority in the assembly. So over the past couple of years, there's been a hung parliament, but it's been fairly stable actually because Macron's party has been governing on its own but with the tacit approval of the conservative party, the Republicans — they're also called Republicans there — who have been tacitly helping Macron's party stay stable in parliament in the past few years.

So it's effectively become a center-to-center-right party with implicit agreements and deals with the traditional conservative party. That has actually really helped the left and the center-left find each other. Macron was so uninterested in pretending he was on the left or on the center-left or keeping that half-and-half balance that it has allowed the center-left… it has abandoned the center-left and the traditional center-left party. And they ended up being sort of a more stable force than a traditional conservative party.

So at this moment, just to end this, there are three blocs. There's a left bloc, which is anyone to the left of Macron, including the center-left. Then there's the Macron party, which is in a tacit agreement potentially with the conservatives. And then there's the far-right bloc, which we haven't really talked about yet, that has been growing and growing and growing and growing in France since the '70s, and for the first time really since the '40s is now at the brink of governing the country.

Beard: Now, let's go into a little bit about why the far-right specifically has seen success in France. Obviously there are some similarities among these parties in every country, but there are also some specifics to French culture in particular, and why this party has seen this growth and success over the past 20 years.

Nichanian: As you already pointed out, the rise of the far-right is not a French phenomenon; it's happened around Europe, even now in countries that up until five or 10 years ago, did not see the rise of the far-right because their own history is like Spain and Germany. But we've obviously seen it in Austria in the '90s when they came into power there in coalition, and Italy now has a far-right prime minister, so we're seeing that a lot. It's also something that we're seeing in the US, the rise of the far-right within the Republican Party and nationally.

Obviously, the Republican Party has always been far to the right, but a certain type of politics that's more akin to the nationalism and xenophobia of the French far-right is also something we see in the U.S. What's specific to France is that there's always been, unlike a lot of European countries, a very clear political wall between the traditional right and the far-right.

Part of that is the heritage of how the conservative party came to be after the Second World War, which was under the leadership of Charles de Gaulle, who was the French general who led the resistance to occupation from outside of France in the '40s. He became president later in France, created the current constitution, and was the head of the conservative party. And there's this imagination of conservatives there as the heirs of de Gaulle, and that has created a particular relationship to the far-right in how they imagine themselves or how they represent themselves. In practice, in terms of what they've done, in terms of the policies around immigration, obviously there's been a lot of blurring over the past 30 years between the far-right and the conservatives, obviously.

But in terms of whether there have been alliances, unlike Italy, unlike Austria, unlike a lot of countries, there's never really been an alliance between the center-right conservatives and the far-right in France. That in a way has allowed the far-right to always remain this opposition force that it is no longer, in places like Austria or Italy, where the far-right has governed, that puts it in a different lane. But that's not been the case in France. There's always been this wall that just broke actually a few weeks ago.

Beard: We touched on this a little bit, but Macron didn't need to call this election. He had an essential majority in parliament in coalition with the center-right conservatives, and yet he's potentially throwing away this majority and this ability to govern in domestic affairs by calling the snap election three years early. So why is he doing this? I know this is confusing to a lot of people, but what's your best guess?

Nichanian: This is the million-dollar question. I'll have some speculation, but I'll preface by saying this is the decision of one isolated man in his presidential castle surrounded by a couple of advisors who are, according to reporting by publications like Le Monde in France who are advisors, history buffs who are imagining themselves in the sweep of French history. He announced it to his own party a couple of hours early. He was supposed to consult the head of the Assembly and the Senate before making this decision but he treated it as a formality.

So it's really like we're really getting into the mind of an individual and a couple of advisors here. There's no grand political strategy especially because, let's just preface this again, an hour before he announced this, his party got 14% in the EU elections, and he called elections for three weeks from then. He got 14% and he was like, "This is the moment to call elections, with the far-right at 33 and me at 14."

Okay. So it's a little wild, but let's try and speculate a little. One, the most politically strategically sound reason would've been that he thought wrongly that the left parties would not be able to ally. So he really called these elections with extraordinary speed, unprecedented speed, and the filing deadline was a week after he called the election. So no one thought there would be elections till a long time from now, and he suddenly was like, a week from now, there's a filing deadline.

The left parties in France, there's a lot of them, and they are extremely hostile to each other and divided. And in 2022 they managed an unlikely coalition that helped them gain a lot of seats in parliament, which knocked the centrist party, Macron's party, down to a hung parliament. And the left party, so that's the greens, that's the Socialists, which are the center-left, that's the Unbowed French, which is the radical left party — they just had to spend months insulting each other during the European election campaign.

And the idea that they would be able to ally again over the course of a few days must have been... we know this. There's been reporting that Macron's camp didn't think they'd be able to. That's super important in France because the system of the parliamentary elections in France requires that blocs be united in 2017 in Macron's first elections. For parliament under Macron, the left became divided. They had four or five candidates in some districts. Complete catastrophe for the left, and that's part of how Macron got a comfortable majority. Macron must have thought, "Oh, I'll get away with it." Turns out that he was entirely wrong. I personally think that it was so quick that the left didn't even have time to fight because they literally only had a few days. If they had been given an additional week or two, maybe they would've been. But literally, they had no time to.

Quite literally, on Monday the party leaders announced. There was immediate pressure. On Monday they announced a coalition, on Tuesday they came up with a fake platform, on Thursday the candidates. There was no time to not be united or to fight about details. And so that's number one. So Macron massively backfired — we can talk about why that's a catastrophe for his party.

Number two, I don't know, there's a lot of fictional imagination of what Macron might or might not want about whether he wants the far right to win because it might help his party down the line. I don't think Macron would've imagined his party would do as badly as he probably will because he's not allowed to run again in 2027.

And if he loses these elections, he doesn't have much to do. So the third reason, I will say, at first when I read it on Twitter or an article, I was amused, but I really think it comes down to that Macron imagines himself as a very grand president. He imagines himself as very important, as a historical figure. The great French presidents have tended to call snap elections because it's one of the most extraordinary powers afforded to them, to just snap their fingers and dissolve the Assembly. And he had advisors who read history, who thought of General de Gaulle, who thought of these other presidents who had done that. It hadn't been done in 25 years, and he thought it was a thing to do, to be in history.

Nir: I think that historians are going to be puzzling apart Macron's decision for quite some time. But Daniel, you alluded to something a moment ago that I want to make sure we drill down on. So let's take a step back for a second, and can you explain exactly how the mechanics of these elections work? I know you said that there were two rounds. The first round is coming up this Sunday, and then one week later, which is, of course, absolutely wild as an American, is the second round. So how do you win an election?

Nichanian: Okay, so there's the easy way to explain this and then it gets complicated. So let's start the easy way. So the easy way is it's a top two runoff system roughly. So there's a first round, it can have between four candidates. It can have between one candidate and often, a lot more. It can be 10 or 15 easily. And the top two candidates move on to a runoff, which is held a week later. So immediately you can see the basic protocol thing here, which is that for a very, very long time in France, there was the right, and there was the left. They fought. The main left party and the main right party just got to a runoff against each other. Even if there were 10 candidates, the main dominant parties got a runoff. Now we have a three-bloc system. In some places, the conservatives are still strong.

So we're talking about three or four blocs. I mean, there are only two spots usually in the runoff, so a lot of people are going to be knocked out in the first round. What's especially wild about Macron having called snap elections with his party being at 14% with very few allies is that they're in great danger of being knocked out of the runoff in a lot of places because they're going to be behind the far-right and behind the left coalition in a lot of places where they did make the runoff two years ago and where they did get seats.

So again, a lot of people, a lot of incumbents right now from Macron's party, at a time when Macron had just won the presidential election with roughly 25% in the first round and 60% in the runoff, then they made runoffs and then won. This time they're in a situation where they're the weaker force of the three blocs, and that can be fatal, you can just be eliminated on Sunday.

So a lot of polls right now have the Macron bloc clearly third as an average nationally. This is really fought district by district, I should have clarified that. That much is similar to the US. The country is divided into 577 districts, and this is a district-by-district battle. So Macron's party will obviously get a top-two runoff in some places, but in a lot of places, it will be knocked out. So polls right now are suggesting that Macron's party will lose half of its seats if not more because it's going to be knocked out in the first round. And then we're going to get a lot of runoffs between the left and the far right. In some places, we'll get runoffs between the center and the left. In some places, we'll get a runoff between the center and the right, the far-right, and so on.

For instance, in Paris, the far-right is non-existent almost, it's very low — so in the districts in Paris we're almost always going to get runoffs between the left bloc and the Macron bloc and so on and so on. So that's the basic structure of the election, and it's very hard to predict because we don't know who's going to be knocked out on Sunday, and then we don't know how people will transfer their votes to other blocs when their blocs have been eliminated. It used to be the case historically for a very, very long time that the far right just couldn't get that much further in a runoff.

Everyone voted for whoever was against the far right in a runoff. That was also the case. That was the case in parliamentary elections, regional elections, and presidential elections. The far-right just stagnated; there was a front against it. That is now gone, that is over. The conservatives already exploded that anti-far-right front 10 years ago and now the center Macron block is clearly stating it's not going to do that. So it's all very uncertain.

Nir: Daniel, you mentioned that there was a simple answer and a complicated answer, and you said you were giving us the simple one. I don't know how simple that was, but I'm a little scared to ask, but what's the complicated answer?

Nichanian: The complicated answer is that the runoff in the U.S., in places that have a top-two system that a lot of our listeners probably have heard about in California and so on, is a strict top-two runoff; only two people make the runoff. So that's actually pretty easy. In France, the top two make the runoff plus anyone who has gotten 12.5% of registered voters in a district.

Okay, so step back. In the past 20 years, not that many people have voted in parliamentary elections. The turnout has been fairly low. So in actuality, getting 12.5% of registered voters was not impossible, but was quite hard. It looks right now that a lot of people are going to vote this Sunday a lot more than two years ago. We're talking about pollsters who are projecting up to 70% turnout. So what that means is that in a lot of places, there might be three-way runoffs, which means that all three candidates of the three blocks could make it to the runoff.

What does that mean in practice? That's very good for the far-right, is what that means, because the far-right wouldn't even need to figure out a way to get to 50% in a lot of places. Historically, in a situation like that, whoever gets in third against the far right has dropped out to avoid the far-right winning.

The left candidates have said already they will drop out in such situations if they're third. They will drop out for the Macron candidate or the conservative candidate to beat the far-right. There's right now a lot of controversy within the Macron camp as to whether they'll do that. They're clearly signaling they probably will not. And that will just mathematically help the far-right because they're going to get first with 30 or 35% in a lot of places, and then qualify. But this is all to say it's a complicated system that gets more complicated the more people vote, and we'll know a lot more on Sunday.

Beard: And I think the broader issue here that we've talked about in pieces, but I want to tackle directly, is the fact that you mentioned this long-term popular front against the far-right. You mentioned that conservatives had abandoned it about 10 years ago. What we've seen pretty consistently is that the left has been willing to do the hard part of dropping out when they're in third, of voting for the centrist candidate when it's a center versus far-right battle. The question in this election is whether or not the center will also do the hard thing of dropping out of voting for the left candidate against the far right. Because like you said, there's been a lot of talk about them not doing that, which would essentially mean abandoning this popular front in order to basically ally with the far-right against the left.

Nichanian: Yeah, that's exactly right, and I think France has not had a three-way kind of divide like this until very recently, and you can understand just if you picture how that works, the temptation for the bloc in the middle to run as the reasonable middle, because they're now selling only two different blocs on each side. It's not even like you are running in an intra-party primary. When it works in the U.S., you literally are running in the general election as the centrists in between two blocks. So positioning yourself as "these two blocks are equivalently extreme and we are reasonable," as a structural thing, is very tempting. That's now what the campaign of the Macron bloc has been over the past two weeks. In a way, it feels unsurprising to an American ear in some ways, but it's just a huge break in French politics because these aren't even the conservatives doing that, it's some people who literally seven, eight years ago were in the center-left party who are now in the Macron party, are using this neither-nor image, or the two extremes image and clarifying, and that's their campaign.

Macron is attacking the left as "immigrationists" right now (to use this word), and all these things. There's a lot of talk of the far-left. Now, to give a tiny bit more context, the left coalition is very broad. It's going from really the center, center-left, or Hollande — who I was talking about earlier, who literally created Macron as a political person, the former president who joined the left coalition — is making a comeback to try to win the scene in parliament with the left coalition.

So it's going from him all the way to radical-left parties, one of which La France Insoumise, France Unbowed, is where the center-right is going after, and they're saying that they're the ones attacking. So I think there's going to be a mosaic of position. I think Macron's party after Sunday will be split; there are going to be a lot of different positions. People are going to try and treat the center-left differently. Who knows? It's just very novel and all of it, it's conspiring to get the far-right again at the brink of winning a majority in the French Parliament for the first time.

Nir: So I have to ask what is absolutely the most unpleasant question to think about, but one that we simply can't ignore at this point. What would the implications be of the far-right taking a majority in the French parliament, or finding themselves at the head of a coalition? And you also mentioned, Daniel, that Macron will still be president no matter what through 2027, but what happens in 2027 if the far right also wins the presidency?

Nichanian: Those are the questions everyone's trying to grapple with very, very quickly, again, because this was not meant to be happening right now and just the level. There were protests across French cities very, very quickly within hours, and a week of the snap election call, a warning of the far right rising. This has all happened so quickly. Just an element of context, the far right right now has 90 seats in the assembly. That was already a record, that was already deemed extremely high in 2022. Now polls indicate that it's going to go from 90 seats to somewhere between 200 and 300, just to give you the scale of the suddenness of its rise. And if it gets a majority, or if it gets close to a majority but doesn't quite get the majority, it will be in a position to take over the French government, the prime ministership, and the entirety of the cabinet.

Now, the French constitution is a little weird. The president doesn't really have a lot of things to do and doesn't really have veto power. It's not the American system. He doesn't have veto power; he doesn't have much to do. So Macron will be president until 2027, but that doesn't necessarily mean much. Historically, when there have been situations like this, there have been arrangements between presidents and prime ministers for the prime minister to respect the president's wishes on some foreign affairs and some matters.

A lot of that is very vague constitutional language. The idea that there'd be really a confrontation here between far-right and Macron is uncharted territory in some ways. So there is room here for a lot of constitutional crises in the coming years. The far-right has a lot of things that it has never gotten to do. Obviously they're extremely focused on topics related to immigration, making it harder for people to become French, making it far harder for people who aren't French living in France to have rights. They want to end birthright citizenship in France, for instance.

They also have very different priorities. One of the things they want to do is privatize public media. There are TV and radio channels that are publicly funded in France which will be immediately under threat. The RN, the far-right party, is suddenly trying to take back a lot of the things it said in recent months over the past few weeks and they keep saying, "We won't do that at the beginning; we won't do that at the beginning." So they're trying to run in some ways a policyless campaign apart from their priorities. But again, it's very important to think, to understand for an American audience that this isn't the U.S., the president doesn't loom there as a major veto power. And then in 2027, to get to your question, well again, the far-right will already have power.

Having (or not) the presidency will obviously free it up a lot, but it's not necessarily that decisive the way it would be here. The French people don't tend to like their incumbents or vote for them to be reelected, so the far-right being in government for a few years would really obviously raise questions about their odds of winning next time, and it would most certainly create a huge 2027 election. A last point I should make though, this could happen again in 12 months or before 2027; the president is not allowed to call new snap elections for a full year after he has called them. But in the situation where the far-right is governing or the left is governing for that matter, as long as the polls wouldn't suggest the same result, you could expect the president to call new elections at some point in 2025 or 2026 unless obviously the far-right is even stronger and snap elections would strengthen their majorities even more.

Nir: We are going to change gears, Daniel. I know I promised that we would hit at least one Bolts magazine-style race. We talked about a whole bunch of Tuesday night's primaries at the top of the show, but there was one contest that we did not get to. It was an interesting and unusual one, I don't think it necessarily broke down along traditional lines. But I would love it if you would give our listeners just a quick summation of what happened in the district attorney's race in Albany County, New York, which of course is the county that is home to the state capitol.

Nichanian: Right. Very much changing gears here, but it was a very interesting race because if you care about criminal justice but also care about internal struggles of the Democratic Party, a longtime DA there, David Soares, who's been a Democrat. He was elected a while back, promising change, promising some support for criminal justice reforms, but really changed his tuns over his time in office as the DA there and became one of the staunchest foes of criminal justice reforms that were being debated, well, in Albany, a few minutes from his office. His office is a few minutes from the state House — the state Assembly, sorry — and the state senate in New York. A few years ago, New York passed very important reforms on issues of bail in particular, and also a reform called Raise the Age, which raised the age at which minors can be tried as adults or have to be tried as adults.

And David Soares throughout that time was on the front lines opposing those reforms, and since then, saying that Democrats — his own party, the lawmakers of his own party — have endangered the public, that they've created issues of public safety. Obviously a lot of people will know that those are arguments that Republicans have used in New York state in the governor's race in 2022 and in congressional races in 2020 and 2022. And so in New York, that has had important ramifications besides just the world of criminal justice. And David Soares was at the frontline; he was again a few months ago in the state legislature testifying, demanding that the reforms be rolled back.

He was facing an opponent yesterday backed by some progressive forces. The opponent is not the staunchest progressive, the staunchest reformer, but he had criticized Soares for fearmongering in his words around these reforms. He had said he supported them and just signaled a different approach to the DA's role, a different approach also to what voice he wants to have at the level of state politics. There also was a scandal involving Soares giving himself a large pay raise or a bonus earlier this year that played into the race. All in all, Soares lost by about 10 points to Lee Kindlon, his challenger, in the Democratic primary. And yeah, that's an interesting change at a time where there are a lot of debates around reform and these DA offices.

Nir: We have been talking with Daniel Nichanian, the editor-in-chief of Bolts Magazine. Daniel, before we let you go, please let our listeners know where they can follow you, where they can find your work, and where they can find Bolts Magazine. And also, tell us when the polls close in France on Sunday, and what's going to be the best place for English speakers to follow the results?

Nichanian: Well, one place would be my Twitter feed, which is at Taniel, T-A-N-I-E-L. You can also find me on other social media now that X/Twitter is in its spiral. I don't know where else, but the polls close throughout France at 8 PM in the last places, and exit polls come out immediately on French TV. They tend to be pretty right because in some places, polls close earlier so they get good estimates. So that's 2 PM Eastern Time in the US. You can also follow French TV online and see the graphics pop up at 2 PM Eastern. That's always an interesting experience, even if you don't know French. You can also find Bolts, which is the magazine that I edit, @boltsmag on Twitter or Threads, and boltsmag.org online.

Nir: Well, Taniel, thank you so much for coming on "The Downballot" this week.

Nichanian: Thanks so much for having me.

Beard: That's all from us this week. Thanks to Daniel Nichanian for joining us. "The Downballot" comes out every Thursday, for everybody who listens to podcasts. You can reach out to us by emailing thedownballot@dailykos.com. If you haven't already, please subscribe to "The Downballot" and leave us a five-star rating and review. Thanks to our editor, Drew Roderick. We'll be off for the July 4th holiday next week, but we'll be back with a new episode in two weeks.