Hello, this is the Eurointelligence podcast. I'm Wolfgang Munchau and with me are Zazana Muncheng and Jack Smith.

Today we would like to talk about two subjects. The meeting of European heads and states of government in Prague yesterday and the gas price policies adopted by various European governments and the political

recriminations that have resulted from the German 200 billion euro subsidy scheme.

Zuzana, let's start with yesterday's meeting, the big photo op, the widest photo of a heads

of state meeting.

I think I can ever remember having seen

an ultimate ultra-wide perspective. But what's behind it? Should we take this series or is this

another G20? Well, it certainly made all the effort to not become a G20. this year is really not about the biggest or the strongest, uh,

nations, but actually the ones that are defined by the geography.

It's about invite, inviting all the states in Europe to come together to this kind

of informal format where it's sort of not really coming up with a statement at the end of

it like the G7 or the G20s were weeks and weeks haggling over words. This was deliberately

very different. The invitation went out to 44 European states deliberately leaving Russia out

and Belarus.

In the beginning, it was not really clear that everyone would accept.

There were a couple of issues here.

We had Greece and Cyprus lobbying very strongly against inviting Adelaan.

In the end, he showed up.

He was actually very prominently the first row next to the president of Azerbaijan and Emmanuel Macron and the host, Pietro Fiala.

So the usual suspects from the European Union were actually in the back row. We saw Olaf Schultz in the back row.

We saw Mario Draghi was in the back row and Listrust was in the quarter.

She almost fell off the picture. I was about to say the picture that I saw, Liz Truss looked like her balance was very unsteady on whatever

...