YouSaid · the spoken record

Sophie Pedder

lines on the record: 36
first: 2022-05-04
most recent: 2022-05-04
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Solve these to cut these endless Gordian knots that kind of trap France and Europe in various forms of stagnation. So I don't know. He's got the incentive to, but we'll probably his instincts, as Sophie said,”
2022-05-04 · Intelligence Squared · What Next for France, Europe and the World? With Sophie Pedder and Ben Judah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think that a French president, if they win a second term because they can't run again, they have an incentive to sort of present themselves as sort of fathers of the nation and try and build this sort of legacy for themselves and try and kind of sculpt the national conversation or maybe build a sort of strange theme park or two around the country. So he has an incentive to do that. But the difference is, and I think Sophie was alluding to that, is he's incredibly young to be president. Most of these guys are incredibly old, like only just sort of made it to that point kind of compass mentus or extremely ill in the case of Miterra, didn't have the energy to that he has. And he's, you know, he's not that much younger. He's not that much older than me, you know, and I think it'll be incredibly frustrating for him to try and sit back and sort of receive delegations and not try and...”
2022-05-04 · Intelligence Squared · What Next for France, Europe and the World? With Sophie Pedder and Ben Judah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I was thinking more of the instance when there was the little boy that didn't call him Mr. the president and was sort of thoroughly disciplined in front of the cameras for the indecency of that. But that sounds wonderful.”
2022-05-04 · Intelligence Squared · What Next for France, Europe and the World? With Sophie Pedder and Ben Judah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the optimist might go that the far right vote is going to have risen and it will afford and one of the contributing factors will be now the changing image of Russia. And it'll be interesting to look at that in France and in Italy in particular over the next few years.”
2022-05-04 · Intelligence Squared · What Next for France, Europe and the World? With Sophie Pedder and Ben Judah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Seen as electorally such a vital asset. And I think that we've already seen that Le Pen try and dial back that association, just not as valuable anymore. And I think in Italy we're also seeing some politicians try and scrub the Putin pictures from the website. The optimist would say that the French establishment has had more difficult challenges in the past such as communism and that the French Communist Party peaked, I believe, 26.2% of the vote. It controlled huge swathes of the country. It controlled whole towns. It had a mass party, mass newspapers. And when the image of the Soviet Union, whether it be a successful society to really a basket case, that was actually a contributing factor to diminish.”
2022-05-04 · Intelligence Squared · What Next for France, Europe and the World? With Sophie Pedder and Ben Judah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Here's an interesting take on this argument I do think that an element of the far right's success has been that there are some voters that were attracted to its relationship with a strong or an apparently strong Russia. And I think that the far-right saw an association with Putin as an electoral asset in France, in Italy, in Hungary, in elsewhere, and even the United States, an association with Putin was seen as positive because he was such a strong leader. You know, now Putin is sort of emitting not strongman energy, but sort of panic and disease energy and disaster energy.”
2022-05-04 · Intelligence Squared · What Next for France, Europe and the World? With Sophie Pedder and Ben Judah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of that, and there were moments of this campaign where I felt kind of alarmed that there'd just been a mainstreaming of it on both the center and the left and the right. It was sort of present everywhere. Then again, at the same time, I do think that community relations in France is much better than they were in 2015 where I think they really hit an adir. I think there's less violence than there was in 2015. I know the Jewish community feels safer than it did in 2015. And I do think that there have been in some aspects of representation and things in French society. There have been some improvements. But I do think it's not in a good place. And I think that definitely if I had a chance to sort of criticise Macron to his face, which I would Be told to immediately.”
2022-05-04 · Intelligence Squared · What Next for France, Europe and the World? With Sophie Pedder and Ben Judah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just in time, he adjusted pretty well. The rallies he did hit the spot for enough of his campaign, enough as electron. And he did show a mark, you did comprehensively win that debate and managed to kind of highlight the flaws of the opposition. One of them that he highlighted was this, as you said, this issue of banning the veil and how that would really kind of rip French society apart. Go back and forth on this. I'm very worried about Islamophobia in France, about intercommunal relations in France, about the mainstreaming of this. There have been moments of Macron's presidency where I felt that his interior minister in particular was playing an almost enabling role with Islamophobia. I mean, very, very critical.”
2022-05-04 · Intelligence Squared · What Next for France, Europe and the World? With Sophie Pedder and Ben Judah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Why was the campaign so short? The campaign should have been longer. It should have been exceptionally long campaign, it's so insulting that it was short. And I think that's part of this sense that France has not been able to have a kind of political debate for during that period. So I think the Macron actually snapped out of it.”
2022-05-04 · Intelligence Squared · What Next for France, Europe and the World? With Sophie Pedder and Ben Judah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, one of the things that I think is important about this election is something quite specific about it, which is... During the pandemic, there was a period where politics almost stopped, where there was just the executive issuing orders, telling people to stay at home and kind of warning them on Instagram ads or making them sign little pieces of paper in France if they went out for a job. And I think that the everyday boxing match of politics disappeared more in France than it did in the UK or in Germany or in Italy. And then Macron didn't quite snap out of that in time. He went straight from COVID mode into war mode. And therefore, I think that this election was characterized by a lot of those emotions, a lot of just politics coming back to the surface, a sense of frustration, of protest votes, of demand to be heard. You kept on hearing France.”
2022-05-04 · Intelligence Squared · What Next for France, Europe and the World? With Sophie Pedder and Ben Judah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Couldn't have been a worse match for Macro. And the fact that he's outlasted her politically, that he's kept up pushing for more common European debt, and now you've got a Social Democrat green-led coalition that's committed to more European debt, at least beginning to have the conversation about it. I think he has a chance to really try and change at least that crucial component of the European Union, how it works.”
2022-05-04 · Intelligence Squared · What Next for France, Europe and the World? With Sophie Pedder and Ben Judah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think that we also need to recognize that whilst the British establishment completely Continue to be this drama of the EU, the Euro, and European Union membership that even Le Pen had to moderate what she says in public about it. And even M ⁇ lenchon to a certain degree has had to moderate publicly what he says about it. So I think that unless Macron can build a party there and really try and build a legacy, there is a question of could a Eurosceptic win next time, but they'll be winning on very different terms. And one of the ways that things will be different is that Macron has this amazing historical chance when he came to power, the worst German, one of the worst German chancellors in generations in terms of the construction of Europe was in power. Angela Merkel, Angela Merkel could, with her refusal to move towards a deeper common European debt.”
2022-05-04 · Intelligence Squared · What Next for France, Europe and the World? With Sophie Pedder and Ben Judah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that there's this deep desire to say in Anglo-America that France is in crisis. In fact, we've all been in crisis to do with the long tail of globalization and the financial crisis and how to kind of distribute resources within countries we've left behinds and these sort of citadels of enormous wealth that have appeared. But I think that the fact is that on the key metric, who was in power in this 10-year period or how many people turned out to vote or what did they vote for? France has come out more stable than Britain or America. I really strongly agree with what Sophie said. Those figures are for turnout in the United States would be extraordinary, never heard of. An amazing turnout in the UK they would be extraordinary, they would be extraordinary.”
2022-05-04 · Intelligence Squared · What Next for France, Europe and the World? With Sophie Pedder and Ben Judah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Police are violence and those are the key reasons there that you see Macron doing very badly. And Le Pen was able to pick up on some of that COVID skepticism, anti-lockdown mood. And, you know, these are tourist islands. Any of you just being put into intense lockdown was kind of absolutely terrible for the economy. It took away the economy for a period. And I think that's the crucial one there in some of France's territories in the Indian Ocean. There's actually an issue of immigration from nearby Africa, which has seen people drift towards the anti-immigration policies of Le Pen, which sort of mean something very different to them than it might in Europe.”
2022-05-04 · Intelligence Squared · What Next for France, Europe and the World? With Sophie Pedder and Ben Judah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I might have a go at answering this one because I was actually in the French Caribbean not that long ago. A couple of things to think about here. The first is that turnouts incredibly low in these places Not a lot of people are voting, not a lot of people are engaged. The second point is that French COVID restrictions were rejected by the population in the French Caribbean that didn't view this as necessary to them, that felt that this was real interference in their everyday lives, that didn't believe that they should be treated in the same way that people in French territories in Europe should be on the metropol should be. And there is a lot of kind of issues to do with policing around that protest.”
2022-05-04 · Intelligence Squared · What Next for France, Europe and the World? With Sophie Pedder and Ben Judah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I just think that's a kind of important to kind of draw to people's attention, really, in the audience, that we've not had the left split in the UK. We might have if we'd somehow had a second referendum and stayed in the EU, maybe they would have ended up being two different Labour parties, a sort of Corbyn-led Labour Party and a sort of Labour Party led by somebody else. But I think that's important to kind of realize.”
2022-05-04 · Intelligence Squared · What Next for France, Europe and the World? With Sophie Pedder and Ben Judah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just going to talk maybe about the French left and the problems of the French left and having a left in the when you're a member of the European Union. And the French left has been split between a pro-European left that assumes the Euro and that assumes the free movement and the single market and a Eurosceptic left, which is M ⁇ lenchon's left, which wants to challenge the Euro, challenge the Commission, challenge Germany, and tear up the rules. And M ⁇ lenchon is a red Eurosceptic and somebody of a pretty fierce anti-Berlin.”
2022-05-04 · Intelligence Squared · What Next for France, Europe and the World? With Sophie Pedder and Ben Judah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think in domestic politics, I think that Macron needs to offer You know, more of a sort of dream for France and for France's young people and more of a vision about how their lives are going to be better and why they shouldn't be optimistic about their lives that isn't just, well, you've sort of got a job now, unemployment's gone down a little bit, and you can still save up and get and sort of get a mortgage will be very expensive and live at the fringes of this town and maybe save up and buy a new patio door. I think that there's a hunger for something in French youth that he's not providing. And I think that he needs to think about that and dig into that part of himself that once dreamed of being a novelist.”
2022-05-04 · Intelligence Squared · What Next for France, Europe and the World? With Sophie Pedder and Ben Judah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the European Union, Macron's a great believer in the European Union, and I think he's done one very important thing, which is continue to push the case of more common European debt, which I think is absolutely crucial for a juster, fairer and more lasting kind of Eurozone. But often Macron has not been very good at playing European Union, which is quite a complicated game involving the Council and allies. And I think, again, not being, you know, sort of Cavalier-Serl, as you say, in kind of French, not being the kind of lone horseman, not trying to act like the kind of providential man of destiny in the European Council might be more effective and working harder with alliances. Macron's got a great opportunity now that he has Draghi in Rome, he has Schultz in Berlin, doing things with them and maybe letting Draghi take more of the limelight, maybe letting Schultz take more of the limelight could really be a kind of good way for him to actually anchor in those wins.”
2022-05-04 · Intelligence Squared · What Next for France, Europe and the World? With Sophie Pedder and Ben Judah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Domestically govern a lot more with elements of the left or elements of the center right, take their ideas on board. He needs to listen a lot more. He needs to bring figures that would be perhaps willing to serve in the government into that government. He needs to treat his party not as just this incredibly macho exercise with Armarsh EM, like his own initials. He needs to treat it as a party. I think a name change might be a very good idea. I think actually empowering that party to be a party for the future might be a very good idea. He needs to allow young people and allow a prime minister to be a powerful voice in the future. And that means having a little less EM, a little less Macron in the public debate. I think that's very important to ensure that his kind of politics endures in France over the next few decades and then kind of internationally, I think.”
2022-05-04 · Intelligence Squared · What Next for France, Europe and the World? With Sophie Pedder and Ben Judah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I think that looking at what Macro has to do now, like a lot of the questions coming in from the audience about the future. So I think what would be interesting to talk about that is I think in a lot of ways, Macron needs to be less macron in order to make the Macron vision succeed. And that means Macron needs to”
2022-05-04 · Intelligence Squared · What Next for France, Europe and the World? With Sophie Pedder and Ben Judah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Wouldn't say that there are that many more of them that are on the far right than there are in the United States. There's also a lot of millennials who have voted for far right or kind of extremist candidates in the United States. And I think it's important not to caricature them. What the majority of them are is sort of disaffected with politics, disaffected with the establishment. They feel that the current system, like really all of it, from the way the market is arranged to the way that the European Union works, to the way that their kind of careers function is sort of under delivering to them.”
2022-05-04 · Intelligence Squared · What Next for France, Europe and the World? With Sophie Pedder and Ben Judah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So two points there. The first is that there were some very popular graphs going around on Twitter showing a kind of majority of young people at some point that appeared to be ready to back the far right with Le Pen. There's actually a little bit of a, that's actually not exactly what those said because most of them weren't going to vote. And then if you kind of added up the numbers, it kind of looked like the majority were on the far right when in fact no, the majority, only around a quarter of them were. So I think that was a little case of sort of bad statistics kind of confusing people. Like young people in France, there are more of them. They're on the far right than there are in the UK.”
2022-05-04 · Intelligence Squared · What Next for France, Europe and the World? With Sophie Pedder and Ben Judah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Even most of her voters thought that we just want her to be in power and she's going to sort everything out. Like Trump voters did. I think people voted for her, sort of rejecting the system. And I think that somebody else will come along at one point that could truly capture that anti-establishment feeling. But I'm not necessarily sure that it will have to be from the far right. It could be a united right far right candidate or it could even potentially be from the left in a few years, you know, especially if we're going to have this severe shock to do with kind of energy prices and cost of living. I'm not determinist about it.”
2022-05-04 · Intelligence Squared · What Next for France, Europe and the World? With Sophie Pedder and Ben Judah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Could present themselves next time and form parties that could suddenly kind of shake up the political landscape. Somebody else could do a Macron uniting the left, or somebody else could do a Macron uniting the right and the far right. I think French politics quite fluid there. I do think that there's a potential in France maybe for celebrities or comedians or somebody to kind of truly play that populist role. And I don't think we've quite seen that yet. And I think this comes back to sort of why Le Pen lost, which is, you know, Brexit as an idea. That really is an idea that incarnated something for people. People believed in that idea, whether they were right to or wrong to is not a topic for us tonight. And people in the United States, they believed in Trump, the incarnated something. And I don't think Marine Le Pen's ever incarnated anything for anyone. I think that it's a protest vote. I don't think...”
2022-05-04 · Intelligence Squared · What Next for France, Europe and the World? With Sophie Pedder and Ben Judah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let me answer that. I do actually think that's a problem. It might be slightly exaggerated. If you look at France's kind of local governance, if you look at France's regions, if you look at even to a certain extent presence in Parliament, like the old centre-right and the old centre-left are actually still alive, that these parties are still there. They're just incapable of producing the strong figures that can fight for power at the national level. So I actually do think that if the right person came along with skills and charisma, both of those parties could actually be potentially revived in the future. I wouldn't write them off tour, in fact. And I think the second thing that I think is I think that the French public is actually kind of, I don't think it's going in one uni direction towards the far eye. I think that compelling or charismatic figures from different trajectories.”
2022-05-04 · Intelligence Squared · What Next for France, Europe and the World? With Sophie Pedder and Ben Judah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Something transformative, something that could really unblock the problems that he views as simply part of life, as part of a kind of free market economy. So I think that maybe it's the lack of dreams that presenting that could eventually kind of begin to pose a problem in his government in the years ahead as people search for them.”
2022-05-04 · Intelligence Squared · What Next for France, Europe and the World? With Sophie Pedder and Ben Judah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Huge amount of magical thinking about trade around Brexit. There are no real solutions for small and medium-sized enterprise enterprises exporting to the EU with the current deal. And this has just sort of waved away and denied in this sort of interesting mirror of Germany and energy. Macron is probably the European politician with the least magical thinking in him. always a serious thought through answer of pretty much everything that's always about like maximizing the efficiency of what France has presented with at the current moment and he's very good at that but what there isn't is there isn't really a sort of dream of France of tomorrow there isn't a kind of vision of what a different France would look like that would really transform society and I do think that there's a significant percentage of France's young of France's minorities of the France that voted for the far left or the far right that are hungry for a”
2022-05-04 · Intelligence Squared · What Next for France, Europe and the World? With Sophie Pedder and Ben Judah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“remain in both and is merely a sort of reformer. So I think it would be a mistake to always try and view this as the far right shaping the debate and putting us in a direction when I think we've got a pretty clear instance here from this election to the last election of the centralist candidate pulling the debate in his direction. And that's how it looks to me. And I think that that's an achievement of Macron's that we should credit. But my worry is that what I like about Macron is bound of what I don't like about him. And what I like about him is that when you look at Britain or when you look at Germany and very different ways, you've got this sort of politics of fantasy. Like Germany doesn't want to use nuclear power and engages lots of magical thinking about how it can avoid using nuclear power but also not use gas and also achieve net zero. And actually there's a huge gaping hole there in the finances. And in Britain there's”
2022-05-04 · Intelligence Squared · What Next for France, Europe and the World? With Sophie Pedder and Ben Judah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Why not to kind of come back on some of your earlier points, actually? I completely agree with you that once you looked closely into the program, it was offering a path that might have led to the disintegration of the European Union from within and that Macron really skillfully managed to expose a lot of the nationalist kind of hypocrisy and the dangers of that in the debate. But my point was more should we view her score as a kind of a triumph of far-right inevitabilism that at the next election, the far right is just going to sort of triumph and push this over, which is how she's going to present it. Or should we look at it the other way, which is that actually Macron has made the question of France's membership of the Euro, France's membership of the EU so strong in the public debate over the last few years that even Le Pen has to pretend that she wants to...”
2022-05-04 · Intelligence Squared · What Next for France, Europe and the World? With Sophie Pedder and Ben Judah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And changed the name of the party, of which her father was expelled from. So for those French voters that took her from 33% to over 40%, I think we've got to bear that in mind, that they felt that she had moderated to a certain extent. On the other side, the negative is I do feel a lot of the kind of Islamophobic tendencies of her party. In fact, they're more than tendencies. They're sort of part of that party's identity, have kind of mainstreamed in France and are now present across the system.”
2022-05-04 · Intelligence Squared · What Next for France, Europe and the World? With Sophie Pedder and Ben Judah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Questioning the Holocaust was talking of mass expulsions wanting to rip up all of France's alliances and kind of international pacts. In the last election, his daughter Marine Le Pen had already distanced herself from some of his anti-Semitic record and was playing FTSE on questions of what exactly she would do with some of France's alliances. But she was still running on a platform to leave the Euro and to have a big break with France's position internationally. And in this campaign, now whether or not she was telling the truth is something up for debate, I think she certainly wasn't, but she did run saying I don't want to leave the euro, I don't want to leave the EU. She didn't really mention immigration. She distanced herself from anti-Semitism.”
2022-05-04 · Intelligence Squared · What Next for France, Europe and the World? With Sophie Pedder and Ben Judah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're going for a very unstable period internationally because of technological change, energy changes, international changes. France is going to have ended up being ruled for 10 years by a moderate centrist reformer, whilst the United States would have elected Donald Trump. Britain would have chosen Brexit. So I think we need to sort of let go of some of our, you know, dare I say kind of Anglo-Saxon prejudices that France is somehow inherently less stable than Britain or America. So that's the kind of first point. The second point is, yes, there's that trend line from Jean-Marie Le Pen with his 18%, the last election. Marie Le Pen got 33%. This time we see her kind of crossing 40%. But there has been an evolution. Jean-Marie Le Pen was...”
2022-05-04 · Intelligence Squared · What Next for France, Europe and the World? With Sophie Pedder and Ben Judah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, if you'd ask me in November 2015 which of the following three countries I was the most worried about, Britain, France, the United States, I would have said I was worried about France. You have the major terrorist attack at the Bataclan. you know a risk not a completely outside risk of intercommunal violence in the Bolia kind of suburbs there's been heightened anti-Semitic dangers and attacks on Jewish localities and elsewhere and you get a sense that both the center right and the center left are sort of exhausted the administration of Francois Hollande is dying and I would have told you well you know what we know about France's political history it can be quite unstable and things could go badly wrong and I think now we need to adjust our lens that actually France”
2022-05-04 · Intelligence Squared · What Next for France, Europe and the World? With Sophie Pedder and Ben Judah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Emmanuel Macrons' recent win in the French election allowed those concerned about the rise of the far right and populism in France to breathe a sigh of relief, and you can hear our debate on Macron's influence over France's domestic politics in our recent Sunday debate. But today we're talking about France's place in the wider world during an era of military conflict and uncertainty as we emerge from the pandemic. Sophie Petter is Paris Bureau chief for the Economist and author of Revolution Fran ⁇ aise, Emmanuel Macron and the Quest to Reinvent a Nation. And joining Sophie is Ben Judah, journalist, author, and senior fellow of the Atlantic Council. His books include This Is London and Fragile Empire, which focuses on Putin's Russia, hosting the discussion is Rosmond Irwin, media editor for the Sunday Times. We also had some live audience questions too. Let's join Rosmond and the conversation.”
2022-05-04 · Intelligence Squared · What Next for France, Europe and the World? With Sophie Pedder and Ben Judah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Welcome to Intelligence2. I'm Connor Boyle, coming up the second of two shows this week analysing the outcome of the French election. We'll be hearing from Sophie Petter and Ben Judah about why it matters not only for France but for the rest of the world too.”
2022-05-04 · Intelligence Squared · What Next for France, Europe and the World? With Sophie Pedder and Ben Judah · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT