Hi everyone and welcome to this latest instalment of our Brexit and Beyond podcast.

And I'm absolutely delighted this week to welcome Isabel Hertner, who,

apart from being a fantastic academic, is a colleague and friend here at King's. Isabel is

senior lecturer in the politics of Britain in Europe at King's College, but is also an expert on

all things European. So Isabel, welcome to you. Thank you very much. Thanks for

having you. And unsurprisingly, we're going to focus on Germany and what's going on in Germany today.

And I suppose the first question, your starter for 10, is how big a deal is this change of chancellor from Angela Merkel to Ola Schultz?

I mean, after 16 years, it's a big deal.

There are so many young Germans who have never seen anyone, but Angela Merkel as the

chancellor, right? And I remember a few years ago, my godson saying, Isabel, can actually a man become

chancellor too? And that's when I realized that, you know, this is how he had grown up in Germany.

This is all he knew. So, of course, after 16 years, having someone new in place is a big deal.

Will it be a big, big, big change in terms of how

Germany is governed and how it will interact with Europe and the world that remains to be seen?

I think there will be some differences, but it's probably not a radical shift.

We'll get on to that in more detail in a minute.

But I suppose it can go one of two ways after a very long tenure, can't it?

It can be a sort of appetite for change, which I remember from 1997 in this country.

It's just like, oh God, can we just have something new?

But that can sometimes be associated as well with a degree of concern

because people have got so used to the sort of old regime

that they're slightly nervous about changing.

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