This summer’s UK and French elections explained, with Mark Blyth

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Over the course of 2024, roughly half of the world’s population will participate in national elections.

On this episode, we take a closer look at two of them: this summer’s elections in the United Kingdom and France.

In the U.K., the center-left Labour Party won in a landslide in July, ending 14 years of Conservative Party rule. In France, an alliance of left-leaning parties banded together to defeat the right-wing National Rally Party, led by Marine Le Pen.

But as political economist and Watson Professor Mark Blyth explains, neither was as resounding a victory for the center-left as the topline results suggest. Furthermore, if these new governments fail to address the social and economic distress so many people in their countries are experiencing, the far-right may not be sidelined for long.

Mark Blyth is the director of the Rhodes Center for International Economics and Finance at the Watson Institute. He’s also host of the Rhodes Center Podcast, another podcast from the Watson Institute. On this episode, he spoke with Dan Richards about what these two elections can tell us about the political fault lines running through European politics today and what they can also tell us about right-wing populism in the U.S. ahead of our own election in November.

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