Welcome to In Conversation, the regular podcast of InCompass. Go to InCompass-Hevon

for free access to all our podcast to date. This is Paul Adamson. I'm in conversation with

Boyan Panjewski. Boyan Panjewski is the Germany correspondent for the Wall Street Journal,

a post he's had for over two and a half years now.

And before that he worked in Brussels and Vienna for over 10 years for the Sunday Times.

We're going to talk about Germany, Bojian.

Thank you for making the time for doing this podcast.

You know Germany pretty well. I know you're a fluent German speaker,

so I presume you're well

introduced in all the corridors of power. It has been said in a slightly trite way, but a very, also

a very accurate way, that Angela Merkel's had a very good crisis. When people were saying she's

at the end of her last term, she's a kind of lame duck chancellor, all of a sudden she's kind

of reinvigorated on the back of the crisis.

Is that the view inside Germany?

Hey, Paul. Well, thank you for having me, first of all. And yes, indeed, she has been totally

reinvigorated as a political leader by the crisis and the management of the crisis that she has delivered.

And I think people were reminded of the value of having a safe pair of hands in office.

You know, she's been a chancellor for 15 years now.

And she's, you know, guided the country through a number of crises, the 2009 financial crisis, the Euro crisis that followed,

the crisis of the Greek debt sort of negotiations,

the refugee crisis, and now you've got this huge global pandemic.

So I think if you look at the editorials in German newspapers,

...