Catherine Field: France Correspondent on the deadlock in forming a permanent government

French politics are still in a deadlock, with no permanent government in sight.  

President Emmanuel Macron's been holding talks with both the leftist New Popular Front and the far-right National Rally.  

National Rally leader Marine Le Pen says she'll block any potential left wing Prime Minister, despite the left securing more of the vote.  

France correspondent Catherine Field told Mike Hosking the caretaker government is somewhat liked, but that could just be the lingering buzz from the Paris Olympics.  

She says no one's really woken up to the fact that France needs a real government as a caretaker government is constitutionally restrained. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Right, France. Catherine Field, very good morning to you.

Speaker 2 (00:02):
Good morning mate.

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Let me on, let me just get her at you.
A couple of quick questions reno government, there's a caretaker
government in place. Are people happy with the caretaker government?
Are the ongoing and urgent talks to try and get
a new government and of those ongoing and urgent talks,
are people genuinely enthused to form a new government or
are we just happy with the status quo?

Speaker 2 (00:25):
Oh gosh, sent a lot of questions off the bat
there like, oh well, if you'd asked me about an
hour ago, I would have said, yeah, people are kind
of going along with it. But just in the last
hour we've had an announcement from French President Emanuel mac
Crome that these talks that he's been holding on Monday
and last Friday with all the representatives of the political
parties in the National Assembly have actually come to nothing,

(00:47):
that this paralysis is continuing. These two days of talks
about who will back who and who will be acceptable
and who will be tolerated has come to absolutely nothing.
So we're back to square one. He has said there's
no clear majority for someone from the far left or
even the respectable left because they are a minority that

(01:09):
there's nowhere of going forward there. So yeah, we have
got nowhere. The current government is kind of like but
everyone's still in this post Olympic buzz. It might people
are still very happy, some are still here. No one's
really woken up to the fact that this country does
need to have a government, and that a caretaker government

(01:30):
is quite restrained in the constitution. It can't, for example,
do any budget negotiations, can't change any laws. It really
can just be a caretaker. So we were all expecting
the President to come up with something, you know, within
the last hour, to say he decided on a new
prime minister, but he hasn't. He's now going to have
another day of talks with other parties from the center

(01:53):
right and a few of the hopefully center left. He
says he will talk about that, but then, of course
on Wednesday we've got the start of the Paralympics, so
he'll be busy with that all day, and then he's
going to Serbia on a visit for two days at
the end of the week. So I don't know when
he's going to come up with any ideas on a
new prime minister. I'm afraid, Mike.

Speaker 1 (02:14):
Okay, well we'll ask you. This is why you're on
every Tuesday. We'll ask you next Tuesday. Meantime, this bloke
they've nabbed Durov? Where does this go? I mean, is
it the French You've nabbed him on instruction from others
or the French just nabbed them because they want to
do and what are they going to.

Speaker 2 (02:27):
Do with them? Okay, this is Pavel Durov, this Russian
born billionaire who's the co founder of Telegram, which has
some nine hundred and fifty million monthly users on an
encryption networks. Actually the French who have nabbed him, Mike.
They are operating on a complaint from Organized Crime unit

(02:49):
here in France. Essentially, what they're saying is that his
platform has failed to regulate what is going on, and
on top of that, it has can tenually refuse to
cooperate with the authorities. In particular, they are saying that
Telegram has enabled illicit transactions, that is you, organized crime fraud.

(03:11):
It has allowed the dissemination of child pornography. It has
also promoted terrorism, and they said that because they haven't
put in place any of the mechanisms for monitoring that,
for regulating who goes on, for actually stopping the sort
of activity that he is liable for it. So the
Paris prosecutor just a couple of hours ago said the

(03:33):
investigation will be going on too, that he will still
be held in custody here in Paris until at least Wednesday,
So that's at least another forty eight hours. And it's
just a way of, they say, showing that they do
need to take this fight against crime social media much
more seriously, and in particular child sexual abuse material that

(03:55):
gets disseminated on these networks exactly.

Speaker 1 (03:58):
All right, Good catch up, Catherine or scene next you say,
Catherine Field out of France verse this morning. For more
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