[MUSIC - Marden Hill: Hijack]

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. A quick reminder. After our conversation with Christina Greer that was partly, at the beginning, based in the Democratic Convention of 1924, that today is WNYC's 100th birthday, and we will have a special 100th birthday program tonight beginning at 7:00. I'll be hosting kind of a pre-game show from 7:00 until a little before 9:00 with lots of audio tape from the 100-year history of WNYC in our archives.

Then we're going to have a live reenactment from The Greene Space that's also going to air on the radio of the first moments of WNYC's history. Brooke Gladstone is going to be playing the Mayor of New York from the time of John Hylan. John Schaefer is going to be playing a role. The actress Sarah Jones is going to be playing a role. LaFontaine Oliver, our president, is going to be playing a role. That ought to be too much fun. It all starts tonight at 7:00 here on the station.

Now, we turn to elections over the last few days in other countries, where parties that long held political power are now taking a backseat, but the trend seemed to be, and this was a surprise to a lot of people, more toward the left than toward the right. France and Britain held major elections that many saw as referenda to long-term ruling parties or on long-term ruling parties in both countries, but very much in left-right terms, with the far-right supposedly rising, but not so much as it turned out.

The UK general election held last Thursday, the 4th of July. How dare they hold an election on the day that we declared our independence from them, but they ousted Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, head of the Conservative Party. That party had been leading the government for 14 years. His Labour Party opponent, Keir Starmer, will now be Prime Minister.

In France, you've no doubt heard by now, the results of the runoff elections for the National Assembly there held on Sunday, yesterday, showed that its citizens repudiated their nation's far-right government and that defied the polls, but the far-left, which some see as extreme, were the real winners. They came in first place, followed by President Emmanuel Macron's more centrist party second, and that was a surprise because they beat the far-right.

Even in Iran, and maybe you missed this one, that election was on Friday. Religious nationalism took a hit. There, the more moderate, reform-minded candidate, Masoud Pezeshkian, a little-known reformist and cardiac surgeon, according to The Washington Post, defeated his ultra-conservative rival to become the next President of Iran. The new President campaigned on modest social reforms and on talks with the United States over the country's nuclear program.

We'll talk about all of this and more now with two reporters from The Wall Street Journal. Joining us are Max Colchester, UK correspondent at The Wall Street Journal; and Stacy Meichtry, who is Paris bureau chief at The Wall Street Journal. Max and Stacy, welcome to WNYC. Thank you so much for coming on with us today.

Max Colchester: Hi, great to be here.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners with ties to the UK, or France, or Iran; listeners in the UK and France, we want to hear from you or with ties to those countries. I don't know if they allow this show to be broadcast in Iran, but if you're in Iran or have ties to this country, help us report the election results there too. 212-433-WNYC. What could these results mean for the future of some of the biggest issues in those countries and what might they mean for us? 212-433-9692.

Max, let's start with the results in the UK. What just happened here?

Max Colchester: What we saw in the UK was really a repudiation of the Conservative government, which, as you said, had been in charge for 14 years. Conservatism in the UK really did go off the rails in the last five years. I've been covering politics here for five years, and I'm now writing about my fifth Prime Minister, which gives you a sense of the churn that we've had over here. We've also had Brexit, and a big push for austerity where the government over here cut spending dramatically.

In a sort of reaction to that chaos, the British public decided to back Keir Starmer, who is a Labour leader. He's left of center, he's a former prosecutor, and he ran really on a pitch of stability and basically putting a bit of integrity back into politics. His election wasn't really the people of Great Britain embracing center-left politics. It was more them rejecting chaos under the conservatives, and so that's really why he came to power.

Brian Lehrer: Well, I want to ask you about what seemed to me just as a casual observer or a relatively uninformed observer to be a contradiction in the way Starmer ran, which is that he ran against the austerity regime that the conservatives had in place. That's very Conservative Party-like in various countries to have an austerity government, but it's been degrading so many services in the UK, and I gather people don't like that. He also ran on not raising taxes. They've promised both things, which can seem contradictory. Can he have less of an austerity government without raising taxes?

Max Colchester: Yes, and I think you've hit the nail on the head there. Keir Starmer has taken the Labour Party on quite a journey. You have to remember when he became the leader of the Labour Party about four years ago, the Party really was quite left. Its leader, Jeremy Corbyn, had advocated nationalizing large swathes of the economy, a four-day work week. They were going to nationalize broadband. Basically, voters said no, thanks, and Keir Starmer then took over and has dragged the Party back to the center ground, and in many ways, his offering is quite conservative. He's all about patriotism, he's all about fiscal prudence, he's all about national security, and that's what he's pitched. He's pitched the sort of conservative-light version of the Labour Party to the electorate, which is what they voted for.

Now the challenge is, as you say, there's not much money in the coffers. The UK debt to GDP is at around 100%, which is very high. The tax take as a percent of the economy is already at the highest level since the 1940s, so there isn't much scale to squeeze more money out of the population. There's a big question as to how he fixes the UK without spending more money, and his answer is pragmatism. You just run the system better, you run it properly, and that's how in the end you make-- basically, you make it easier for people to live in your country, to build things and so forth, and that will grow the economy. Really, the proof is in the pudding, and we really don't know how that's going to play out.

Brian Lehrer: Let's turn to France, which Stacy Meichtry, also from The Wall Street Journal, is the really big global election news today after a first round of voting that put the far-right National Rally Party in the lead. The left-wing surged unexpectedly in the second round of voting yesterday. The snap election that Macron had called of the lower house of Parliament, known as the National Assembly, happened after the EU parliamentary election seemed to indicate that the far-right party was rising in France. The polls showed that the far-right party, the National Rally, was going to win, and it didn't happen.

Stacy, what happened?

Stacy Meichtry: [chuckles] Well, it's been a total rollercoaster ride from the very start. After Macron called the snap elections, we started to see the poll numbers move in favor of National Rally. I think this created a general sense of alarm among many French people, particularly those anywhere from the center-right to the left.

Basically, what happened is that after the first round, which Le Pen, in fairness, won convincingly; after the first round, the other parties decided to coordinate across different district races and ensure that Le Pen's candidates would only be facing one opponent as opposed to several. This basically prevented the opposition vote, if you will, from being cannibalized and divided. As a result, we saw all of these voters, again, from the center all the way to the left, coalesce around individual candidates, and it produced this surprise result last night, which really had us all gobsmacked when the numbers came in. I think right up until the very last moments, the polls were suggesting that National Rally was going to finish with the most seats in the new Parliament, and instead they finished third.

Brian Lehrer: The other thing I saw about that was that the turnout was much larger than expected and the biggest turnout for any election in France in decades. What does that tell you? Does that mean there was a big silent majority in France that was not turning out for a lot of elections, but that just did not want the far-right to be in charge?

Stacy Meichtry: I think that's part of it. That definitely animates folks on the left and even people in the center. I think the turnout for the far-right was also fairly significant. You don't get to 66%, 67% unless everybody's showing up. National Rally, they're a special case because on the one hand, we've witnessed over the years-- and like Max, I've now been covering several elections, basically for the past decade here in France. We've watched them lose election after election. One could come away from that experience thinking to yourself, well, the far-right is simply doomed in France.

The reality is that with every election, we see them gaining more and more votes within Parliament, and so over time, the water is rising. The question is whether or not it's ever going to get to a level that will result in, for example, Marine Le Pen getting elected President. This time, they managed to pick up 50 votes in Parliament, and that's nothing to sniff at. When you get 50 votes in Parliament, it comes with a significant amount of state funding. It means that they can build up their Party machinery, and it strengthens them going into the next round of elections. The headline news yesterday was the left prevailing, but there is this sort of subplot, which is the far-right gradually chipping away at the edifice of the French Republic.

Brian Lehrer: Listener writes, "I'm from the UK. It's wrong to say Keir Starmer's Labour Party is center-left because the center line has moved so far to the right. Starmer is at best centrist, but by traditional or pre-Tony Blair standards, center-right." Max, do you agree with that?

Max Colchester: No, I wouldn't say he's center-right. No, I think he's definitely from the progressive wing of the Party. I think he is a human rights lawyer by background, and I think a lot of what he advocates is-- I think if he had the money, he would definitely back a bigger state. He's going to introduce an industrial policy. We're going to see a plan to try and create a sort of nationalized energy company. He wants to nationalize the remaining privatized bits of the rail network. I think Starmer still has at core a sort of center-left agenda. The problem is he just doesn't have the money to actually execute on that basic ideological desire.

Yes, I can see why people say that. I think a lot of people to the left in the Labour Party are very disappointed by Starmer. They think he is someone who's a turncoat and who gave up on the progressive ideals that had been put to the fore by his predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, and they feel that he basically betrayed what many people wanted to see in the UK.

Brian Lehrer: A few more minutes on the election results from overseas over the weekend. I read one text from a listener about the British elections there. Here's one about the French elections for you, Stacy. This says, "Macron's snap election was a dangerous gamble with democracy. They dodged a bullet because the left and center came together. Hitler won his election because the left opposition was fatally divided. For us, having a brokered democratic convention would be the same, and I am not sure if the left would do the same for the centrists here."

That listener is making one version of the connection that I wanted to ask you both about before we run out of time; the implications for over here from what just happened over there. I think there's a narrative, Stacy, in the US media, which goes, the whole world is trending toward the authoritarian far-right. Actually, maybe not. Maybe the United States, with this relatively big bloc that's MAGA, is the outlier because we've seen some other countries in Europe move back from that: Poland, the Netherlands. Now, France was supposed to have a far-right government, and they didn't. The UK moved from a Conservative government to a Labour Party government. Can you put it in kind of a big global perspective and how we should view the United States in that context, given these results?

Stacy Meichtry: Yes. I think the interesting thing is that once you take the issues to the voters, in this case, the anti-immigrant message of Le Pen, and you present them with her program and you get into the nitty-gritty details of what it would involve, what we've seen is that the public responds with a pretty decisive no. That requires, I guess, having a certain level of trust in the public. I think the concern across the political spectrum is often there's almost this knee-jerk hesitancy to confront voters with the issues, that in a way they need to be almost protected from themselves. The argument against the snap elections was, oh, it's too soon. This is going to backfire. Be careful what you wish for. The argument that Macron would make in his defense is, I have no other choice. This is a democracy, and I need to exercise the levers of democracy.

Brian Lehrer: A last word from you, Max, covering the UK, to that same question of where the-- I mean, even Iran rejected their religious nationalist candidate, while we consider a candidate who is propped up by the religious nationalists.

Max Colchester: Yes, it's funny you should look at it through that lens because I remember a few years ago, I was talking to Starmer's- one of his top advisers. I said, "How are you going to beat Boris Johnson?" Who was then the Prime Minister in the UK and who was a populist and had a fairly right-wing agenda. I said, "How are you going to beat this charismatic right-winger?" She said, "Look at Biden." This was obviously before Trump. He beat Trump back in 2020. She said, "Look at Biden. Biden is going to win because Biden is offering a message of pragmatism and people have had enough of chaos."

That's what's happening in the UK. People said no more chaos. They see what the populists have to offer. They see that that actually doesn't solve their problems. They then swing back to a centrist politician. Now the risk is then they swing back to a radical when they realize that the centrist politician doesn't have the answer either. I think that's what we're seeing. We're seeing government seesawing between radical solution doesn't work, go back to a centrist with a practical solution, that doesn't really work either. I suppose as a voter and someone who believes in democracies, the worry would be that people start swinging more and more wildly, right? Then you get more and more radical solutions each time we go through this cycle. I think that's probably the concern going forward, I think.

Brian Lehrer: That's so interesting. You know what? I was going to end it here, but we just got a call from Laurent in Southwest France, and we don't get a call from Southwest France every day here in New York. Laurent, you're on WNYC. Thank you so much for calling in. Hello.

Laurent: Yes. Hi, Brian. I actually listen to your show regularly from south of Bergerac, it's like east of Bordeaux.

Brian Lehrer: I'm honored.

Laurent: Anyway, I was calling because I live in a very small village, and I was very surprised by two things. First thing, not last Sunday, but the Sunday before, the National Rally got the first position out of about 134 votes, they got 63. Yesterday on Sunday, they got exactly the same amount of votes, 63, not one extra. What was surprising, for the second part of why I call, is that there were four candidates on the first round and only two for the second round, and it's somebody from the center-right who got the extra votes from the other candidates who actually gave him- or not gave him, but told voters to vote for him, and he got 66. I was very happy yesterday.

Brian Lehrer: Why do you think it came out that way, Laurent?

Laurent: I was very surprised because my village usually votes on the left. There is a very strange atmosphere sometimes in rural France, in the countryside. People, I think they watch too much TV and they have too many screens, and they got all those ideas about insecurity and immigration, but there is nobody here that you can actually-- There is no threat. There is nothing happening very, very dangerous for everyday life. I was very shocked by the fact that the National Rally got so many votes and still does.

Brian Lehrer: Even in rural France, my life is okay, but look what I'm seeing on my social media feed. Uh-oh.

Laurent: Yes, it's bad. It's very bad sometimes. I was very happy yesterday that the left got first position, and it's very hopeful.

Brian Lehrer: Laurent, thank you very much. With the word hopeful, we end it. We thank our guests from The Wall Street Journal, Max Colchester, UK correspondent; and Stacy Meichtry, Paris bureau chief for The Journal. Thank you both so much after a busy weekend for both of you- for coming on with us for a few minutes today. Thank you. Thank you.

Max Colchester: Thanks, Brian.

Stacy Meichtry: Thank you. Great being here [crosstalk]--

Brian Lehrer: Brian--

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