extend to 17 days due to bad weather back on earth. ♪ you're watching al jazeera. reminder about top stories, twitter's board has unanimously decided to sell the company for elon musk in a deal worth $44 billion. if it goes through, shareholders we paid more than $54 per share. >> essentially, elon musk came up with the financing. that is what happened. it was 10 days ago he made an all cash offer of $44 billion to buy putter. most people on wall street did

not take that too seriously, because even for elon musk, who is worth more than four times that $44 billion, it would have been nearly impossible for him to some plea write a check for $44 billion and people on wall street knew that. not impossible, but quite difficult. what he needed was financing. >> russian forces have attacked and for structure including rail lines which ukraine said has stopped it from resupplying troops on the front lines in east. the station near lviv was one of five struck by missiles. u.s. secretary general antonio -- the summit has been arranged in the hopes of pushing diplomatic channels between ukraine and russia. russian media outlets reported a series of blasts in moldova's breakaway region. it reportedly happened in the ministry of state security building. so far there have been no reports of casualties.

a turkish court has sentenced a businessman and activist to life in prison for attempt into overthrow the government. the charges relate to financing protests in 2013 and involvement in the 2016 coup attempt. israel says it will once again allow palestinian workers and merchants to enter from gaza on tuesday. the crossing was shot on saturday after hamas rockets targeted southern israel. it followed repeated israel incursions into occupied east jerusalem. in ethiopia, the liberation front has completely withdrawn all of its neighboring forces from the neighboring far region. it will allow -- those were the headlines. be back with more and half-hour. next is inside story. do stay with us. ♪

>> al jazeera. wherever you are. mohammed: what will the french president's second term look like? emmanuel macron is reelected, but only after defeating the far right and gaining votes from people who chose him reluctantly. how will he deal with a divided electorate? this is inside story. ♪ a lot welcome to the program. i am mohammed jamjoom. emmanuel macron is reelected president of france for a second term. he is the first person in 20 years to achieve the feat. but the result from the second round runoff seems more a sigh of relief than a grand victory. macron defeated marine le pen,

who achieved the strongest ever result for a far right candidate. 28% of eligible voters did not cast a ballot. that is the highest abstention rate since 1969. macron promised to be a president for everyone, including those who only voted for him to keep le pen out. attention now turns to be legislative elections in june. both the far right and far left hope to win more seats and put pressure on macron's agenda. werner smith reports from paris. reporter: emmanuel macron gambled that a short but intense election campaign would be enough. it was. his comfortable margin of victory over marine le pen gives him a second term at the palace. only two presidents before him have managed that. in his victory speech, macron promised his next five-year term would be different. >> this new era will not be a continuity of the five previous years, but the collective

invention of a revised method for five better years for our country and our youth. reporter: for his supporters, this is a win that endorses what they believe is their country's role at the heart of the european union. >> i am very happy. up to the last minute i thought it would have fainted. you never know in life. anything can happen. >> today, the abstentions were significant, but emmanuel macron did a fruit -- did a good job and he deserves to lead france again. reporter: marine le pen gave the far right their highest share of the vote in a french election, but her path for the presidency was blocked again by a republican front. in other words, many voters who had supported other candidates in the first round voted this time to keep le pen out. >> the game is not over. in a few weeks we will have the legislative elections. which, as we know, are a

distortion of the clinical trend and creator risk emmanuel macron , concentrating all executive and legislative powers. reporter: the far left president of candidate took just 1% less of the vote than le pen in the first round. he wants his party to win enough support in the legislative elections that macron is forced to appoint him prime minister. >> to all of you, i say do not resign yourself. on the contrary, go completely into the action. democracy can once again give us the means to change direction. reporter: the war in ukraine and the rising cost of living were main concerns for french voters. both issues will likely dominate the start of macron's second term. there probably will not be much of a grace period for the president, especially from the left, many of whom voted for him reluctantly. macron has vowed to make it easier to hire workers and improve on a plymouth benefits.

bernard smith, al jazeera. mohammed: let's go ahead and bring in our guests. from france, thomas guenole, a political scientist. in paris, gesine weber. and in the u.k., aurelien mondon , a senior lecturer in politics, and author of reactionary democracy, how racism and the populist far right became mainstream. a warm welcome to you all and thank you for joining us today. aurelien, let me start with you. there are those who said the result of this election is a rejection of the far right. but marine le pen achieved the strongest ever result for a far right candidate. so is it too early to celebrate? aurelien: absolutely. i don't think there should be any celebration, to be honest. marine le pen has broken a new

record for the far right. she has done much better than her father as of are dead better than she ever did. it is not a victory by any stretch of the imagination. and worse than that, she won against a candidate who has spent the best of the past five years mainstreaming a lot of far right ideas and pushing a lot of islamophobia politics into the mainstream. while it may be an electoral defeat for the far right, they are still winning ideologically. mohammed: president macron at attempted to appeal to the left in the past few weeks to win this election. do you think we're going to see more tems from him and a leftward shift going forward? is he going to pay more attention to social issues going forward? thomas: well, if we believe what

he said during his acceptance speech, his victory speech yesterday evening, he said he was not aware of the fact that millions of left-wing voters voted for him only to make sure the far right would not seize power. and he would take that into account while framing a new way to govern. ok, but what will he actually do? what he should do obviously is try to create what we call in french, basically, a specific global political national unity government, with everyone except far right and maybe far left. so that is what he should do in order to bring political

appeasement to the country. but we have absolutely no evidence that this is actually what he is going to do. that is what he should do but we do not know if he is going to do that. mohammed: gesine, i imagine this must have been a huge sigh of relief out of brussels and also out of washington with the result of this election, correct? gesine: exactly. i think it was a sigh of relief in basically all european capitals and also on the other side of the atlantic. because if we think through the scenario, le pen as the french president, there would have been devastating consequences for the european union. le pen was basically one of the key principles of european integration, such as the supremacy of eu law over national law, and the unwritten principal, but the well-established practice of french and german cooperation are key issues.

so yes indeed, it's very good news for europe, but also for transatlantic cooperation that macron has won the presidency again. particularly in brussels, where france is still holding the rotating presidency of the council of the eu. that means we can most likely -- from the french side and also very ambitious initiatives from the french side over the next 2.5 months. that is the time remaining of this presidency. but yeah, it's a good step to advance on many issues of european integration. mohammed: aurelien, i want to speak to you about the far right in france and the moment they find themselves in. eric campaigned on a much more extreme platform in the run-up to the first round of presidential elections. did his campaign make marine le pen seem moderate by comparison?

i guess what i am asking is, did his campaign normalized marine le pen? aurelien: absolutely. i think marine le pen benefited both from eric making her look more moderate by comparison, because he was much more extreme, where he was espousing old far right national positions, which make her look more moderate, even though her program was potentially more radical. she also benefited from the continuous mainstreaming of far right politics in french which we have witnessed in the past. marine le pen, while she did not run a particularly good campaign, she benefited from both sides around her. one of them making her look more moderate and the other one making her look more legitimate

and mainstream. so in a way i think she was very lucky with the way the campaign panned out. zimou also allowed her to avoid some of the flak she would have gotten regarding her links to russia. it seems zimou suffered the most from these. mohammed: let's speak to a moment with you, thomas guenole, about what is going on with the left at this moment in france. what has this election cycle meant for the left? jean-luc got very close to reaching the second round in the presidential election. what happens now? thomas: well, you have to keep in mind that among the 22% of french voters who voted for jean-luc, all of them are left-wing voters. and half of them voted for him because they agreed with his platform. the other half voted for him only to try and get left-wing

candidates into the second round of the election. what does that mean? it means that 22% is not the actual political strength, electoral strength of this party. it is almost the total strength of the left-wing combined in france. that is what it means. so those who think that there is nothing else now on the left side on the political french spectrum, nothing else on the left part, in my opinion, it is misleading. because, again, half of his voters, in fact, are left-wing voters who would have voted for something else if it were not for the specific rule of the second round in the presidential election. so now the question for the left wing is how to maximize the results for the parliamentary elections.

obviously the reasonable path would be a complete unity, a complete left-wing alliance with all political forces of the french left wing. the problem is jean-luc and his lieutenants either set -- said no to an alliance, they said that to the socialist party which is centerleft in france, or they said yes, but with conditions that were obviously unacceptable, because they were giving so few to their potential partners. that is what they have done with the green party. so, more or less, there will not be actual unityu for the french parliamentarian elections because jean-luc and his lieutenants prefer to be the kings a lonely situation instead of trying to build a fair alliance. it's a pity, but that is their

choice. they are free to do that. mohammed: gesine, now that emmanuel macron has been reelected, there's ahuge sense of relief from the eu, but of course there are now the legislative elections that are coming up. what i'm curious about is, is there a sense of worry in brussels about what might happen in those legislative elections if macron's party does not keep its majority? what does that mean for his championing of the you going forward? gesine: first of all, what we have to bear in mind in that context is the french president has traditionally a big margin of maneuver for his action in terms of foreign policy. because what we call foreign policy, kind of a reserve domain. even if he does not have the majority in parliament, this will only have a limited direct

impact on what he can do in europe, because he and his team can still pitch the ideas and try to advance things on the level of the council, but also through the parliament. so that would not be directly affected. also when it comes to defense, from the first side, that would also work. however, we have to bear in mind that, for example, the french parliament has to authorize every deployment of the french armed forces that goes beyond four months. particularly with the eu, potential deployment of french forces, potential new deployment, because france is now withdrawn from mali, but discussions are ongoing about french involvement. that could become a factor of concern or of major interest in

brussels, and also in ohter member states. overall we have to bear in mind that particularly if macron does not win the parliamentary majority, building consensus with the other parties and having good relations and working relations with parliament to get domestic agenda implemented will take a lot of presidential resources. and those are potentially resources that would be mission -- missing on the european level. so let's see how relations between macron and parliament go. let's see if the french, as they used to do, equip him with the parliamentary majority together. but i am currently not very optimistic that his party will have this majority. mohammed: thomas, it looked to me like you are reacting to some of what gesine was saying.

did you want to jump in? thomas: respectfully, yes. if we look at the french parliamentarian elections, for the past two decades now, we've had parliamentary elections a few weeks after the presidential election, and here is what happens again and again and again. all electorates, all voting bl ocks, if i may, got demobilized. really, really dropped from the voting rate. but the voters who voted for the winner of the presidential elections, they were demobilized way less than the others. so, in terms of actual votes cast, what you see is a landslide in favor of the guy who won the presidential election. so if things keep being the same, and they have been so for the past 20 years, we will see a

landslide majority in favor of emmanuel macron in the next parliamentary elections. not because there is another spring of support in his favor, but because of what we call in french, which would be the different abstention rate between the different blocks after the presidential election. mohammed: aurelien, marine le pen in her speech after the results were announced said she would fight on to secure a large number of representatives in these legislative elections. doesn't look to you like her party could do quite well in those elections? aurelien: no, i don't believe so. i think thomas summarized the wider context very well, and it is even more difficult for the far right in general because they are facing a two-round election. generally in the parliamentary election, not only is there more abstention, but it tends to

benefit the party of the newly elected president. but there also tends to be more alliances in the second round against the far right, and parties dropping off from the contention to make sure the far right does not go through. this is why the other parties have only had a handful of seats in parliament except in 1986 when it was changed to a provisional vote. so no, i don't think she will do very well, but it will be interesting to see if she manages to keep her electorate mobilized or if it will be -- or if this time around there'll be protests and abstention towards other parties. there will be lessons to be learned but i cannot imagine they will do particularly well. mohammed: i just want to ask you about something you are touching on there. the idea of this republican

front, that people will join together to try and prevent a far right candidate from winning the presidency. is that something that has been stripped away by the result of this election? is that a concept that is crumbling right now, or is it still strong? aurelien: it is certainly something that is crumbling, and this is something that has been crumbling for quite a long time now. this republican front is no longer as strong as it used to be. in 2002 for example, you would have noticed more and more presidential candidates, we had one in 2017, two this time. there is more and more hesitation on the right wing of the political spectrum with regard to alliances. so again, i think it will be one of the lessons of this parliamentary election, to see what kind of alliances come out. i suspect there will still be a semblance of a republican front, but it will be strong enough to

prevent them from gaining too many mp's. but it will be very important to keep an eye on how mainstream they are becoming, and how weak the republican front is becoming as a result of the mainstreaming of far right politics in france. partly because of the actions of the mainstream itself, rather than just the actions of the far right. mohammed: gesine, from your standpoint, how much has the war in ukraine impacted what went on in this election cycle, and the result of the election? gesine: basically, we saw went -- when the war in ukraine erupted, or when russia invaded ukraine in february 2022, we aw t-- we saw there was a rally. we saw population -- popularity for macron skyrocket but that it dropped down. meaning that leaders in times of crisis, or times of acute

crisis, are often given a bit more credit or have a bit more popularity among the public than they would have normally. but we saw that macron's score then dropped down a little bit, almost to the level it was at before. so i would not say it has significantly impacted the campaign. because we have seen that the major topic in france here is the cost of living. of course it has an impact, even if the impact was not as significant the cost of living. because we saw during the debate between le pen and macron, that le pen was really struggling to defend herself against the points brought up by macron regarding the loan she still has with a russian bank, or her relations with vladimir putin that she has been maintaining since quite a few years.

so, that has definitely played a role. and when it comes to the question of capability of french leadership, i assume that that also has played a role because macron has already manifested that he has the capacity to lead. so that might have benefited him, but in the end, the dominating topic was the cost of living. mohammed: thomas, what are some of the challenges president macron will face these next five years, and what you think is next term is really going to look like? thomas: well, the thing is, what he stands for politically includes several major reforms on the social and economic front. and by that i mean reform of our pension system, reform of our insurance system, labor market

insurance system, and also reform of our health protection system. the problem is, all three kinds of reforms, the problem is it would damage the purchasing power, the living standards of millions and millions of frenchmen. and as gesine already mentioned, the cost of living is already the major priority, the most important priority for half of the french population. which means that, in fact, the ends already don't meet for half of the french population nowadays. and to speak about the things the way they are on the field, the price of bread is rising. the price of fuel is rising. the price of, in fact, most of the things you have to buy to

feed your family is rising. it's not particularly happening in france, it is all over the world currently. but what we have among democracies, as a reaction to this situation, is obviously a growing trend of basically voting against the system and in favor of the far right. if i may, i am sorry for this dark joke, neo-fascism is the new black in terms of political trends. mohammed: all right. well we have run out of time so we have to leave the conversation there. thank you so much to all of our guests, thomas guenole, gesine weber, and aurelien mondon. and thank you for watching. you can see the program again at any time by visiting aljazeera.com, and for further discussion go to facebook.com/ajinsidestory. you can also join the story on twitter. from me and the whole team here in doha, bye for now. ♪

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man: the response by the u.s. to hurricane maria was really slow and really poor. one of the mor impacts of hurricane maria is that their electrical service was disrupted in some cases for almost a year. woman: we got to work really quickly, and we started...[continues in spanish] and just, you know, reaching out to your neighbors, see what you need. "how can i help?" man: when it comes to the great resiliency, somehow to deal with catastrophe,ou know? it's something that we naturally engage in maybe as part of