France: National Assembly speaker to be elected on July 18
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00:00Philip, we were hearing there in that report from Carys about tomorrow, the
00:05National Assembly, an important day. Can you give us an idea why? Yeah, it's an
00:09important day but it comes right in the middle of a political mess, Angela, and
00:12that is not going to make this an easy day tomorrow because it's going to be
00:16the election of the Speaker of the National Assembly, which is the most
00:20important election, but also the heads of the different commissions, including the
00:24Finance Commission, which is the one that's most hotly wanted. The problem is
00:28that, as we've been hearing in that report, no political groups in France
00:32have an absolute majority following the disillusion of the National Assembly
00:36last month and the elections, which took place in two rounds, the second round
00:39being earlier this month, where only the left-wing grouping of four parties got
00:45enough seats to be victorious in that election, but they didn't get an overall
00:50majority. You need 289 seats to get an overall majority, they only got 193, which
00:54is almost a hundred short. So there is a lot of infighting going in because they
00:59have been asked to nominate a candidate for Prime Minister. The problem is, in
01:03that four-party grouping, there are three parties that get on quite well with each
01:07other, the Communists, the Greens and the Socialists, but there's one party that
01:11don't get on with and that's the far-left France Unbowed Party, but they
01:15won the most seats out of that four-party grouping and they feel that
01:19they should have the right to put forward a candidate who is going to be
01:22Prime Minister, something that the other three parties don't agree with. So we've
01:26had a couple of candidates put forward this week, one is Huguette Bello, who's a
01:31regional advisor for the French Overseas Territory, La Réunion, she's close to
01:36France Unbowed, her candidacy was turned down by the Socialist Party. Then we had
01:40another candidate put forward, this time by the Socialist Party, the Communists
01:44and the Greens, whose name is Laurence Toubiana, she was turned down by the
01:48far-left France Unbowed Party. So they can't agree and this is dragging on and
01:53on and on, the only thing that these four parties agree with and why they won
01:57the most seats in this election is their hatred for Marine Le Pen and the
02:01far-right National Rally. That brought them together in a rush to try to put
02:06together an ad-hoc grouping which would have enough support to win the election
02:10and stop the National Rally from getting an overall majority or taking power, that
02:14that succeeded in doing. Now the hard bit is trying to agree with each other about
02:17what to do now they've actually come first in this election. In the meantime
02:22there's something else happening and that is that Emmanuel Macron is looking
02:25at all this and saying it's a real mess. I may have been responsible for it but
02:27there is an open door for me maybe to try to build up some kind of majority
02:32for myself, not an open majority but a majority bigger than the left-wing
02:35majority with my group which won 164 seats plus the Socialists because they're
02:42annoyed with the left-wing grouping and maybe even the right-wing Republicans
02:46who could also join forces and then we'd have more seats than the left-wing
02:50coalition and we'd be able to form a government. It's dragging on and on and
02:54guess what's happening we have the Olympic Games starting in just about
02:57nine days time and a lot of people are worried that if there's no government
03:01during the Olympic Games and there's a major problem in France this could all
03:04fall flat. So tomorrow is a very crucial election to come back to your question
03:09for the head of the National Assembly. And are they likely to be able to agree
03:14on that? We'll have to wait until tomorrow but my little birdie tells me
03:19probably not. Okay thanks very much. Philip Taylor giving us the latest on
03:24those deadlocked talks here in France amongst the left-wing alliance and talks
03:29going on elsewhere as well.