Welcome to the Tech Policy Podcast. I'm Evan Schwarzenegger. On today's show, the German election.

Germans head to the polls this weekend. What does it mean for tech policy in Germany and around the world?

Joining me to discuss this is my good friend Julia Schutzze, project manager of the Transatlantic Cyber Forum at SNV, a German think tank.

Julia, thanks for joining the show.

Thanks for having me.

Since I didn't want to butcher the name of your think tank, I left it up to the native speaker.

So why don't you go ahead and tell the listeners where you work?

Stiftung, Neue, Forandward.

Of course, who hasn't heard of it?

So Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany, she's been kind of a powerhouse for many years there.

And anytime it seems that she might be struggling with her popularity over things like immigration and refugees, she seems to just make it through.

And it looks like all signs point to her winning this weekend.

And are we essentially just looking at kind of a status quo like are we going to have

an election and then Germany is just going to be kind of the same as it was before the weekend?

I would hope not. But yeah, your judgment is kind of true with Merkel at least. But I think

what the German public is kind of feeling right now is we want to have securities,

so we want to kind of continue the path we have, but we also want change.

So what we are most likely going to see is that the number of parties in parliament will increase,

maybe up to seven, and then it will really be up to how many percentage

does Merkel's party get and then any of the opposition parties right now or even the new

edition, the FTP is probably going to come back into parliament. And they could be a coalition

party for Merkel as well.

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