Episode 200! Sweden’s elections and a guy who used to run a country
The Europeans | European news, politics and culture
Katy Lee and Dominic Kraemer
0.0 • 0 Ratings
🗓️ 15 September 2022
⏱️ 47 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
We're back after our summer break, and celebrating a milestone this week: our 200th episode! To mark the occasion, we're joined by a special guest, former Finnish prime minister Alexander Stubb. Now that he's training the next generation of leaders at the European University Institute in Florence, we asked him to grade the current batch on their handling of everything from the war in Ukraine to the energy crisis. We're also talking about Sweden's election, an ill-advised decision by Bosnian football bosses, and how sheep can help to fight forest fires.
Alexander Stubb is Director of the School of Transnational Governance at the European University Institute. You can follow him on Twitter here.
Back in 2020 we interviewed another former Finnish PM, 16-year-old Aava Murto, after she held the job for a day. You can check out that conversation in this episode.
And Aleksandar Brezar's reporting on Bosnia and Herzegovina's planned friendly against Russia can be found here.
This week's Isolation Inspiration:
'Take A Chance' - DOMi & JD BECK, feat. Anderson .Paak
'Thou Wilt Keep Him In Perfect Peace' - Samuel Sebastian Wesley
'The short unhappy life of Elizabeth Windsor' - Politico Europe
Thank you so much to all the listeners who have helped us reach 200 episodes. If you enjoy our podcast and would like to help us keep making it, we'd love it if you'd consider chipping in a few bucks a month at patreon.com/europeanspodcast (many currencies are available). You can also help new listeners find the show by leaving us a review or giving us five stars on Spotify.
00:22 We're back, and it's our 200th episode!
03:36 Good Week? Sweden's elections
20:27 Interview: Alexander Stubb grades Europe's leaders on their handling of various current crises
36:33 Isolation Inspiration
41:04 Happy Ending: Firefighting sheep and goat(s)
Producers: Katy Lee and Wojciech Oleksiak
Music: Jim Barne and Mariska Martina
This podcast is part of the Are We Europe family. Find more like-minded European podcasts at areweeurope.com/audio-family.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, and welcome to the Europeans. |
| 0:24.7 | If you can't remember who I am, because it's been a while, this is Katie in Paris. |
| 0:29.0 | And this is Dominic in Amsterdam. |
| 0:31.9 | And I thought we could play a fun game, Dominic, and ask the listeners to guess from the sound |
| 0:36.5 | of our voices which one of us has |
| 0:38.6 | just had an obscenely long holiday and which one has not really had a holiday at all. |
| 0:44.0 | Too close to the bone? |
| 0:46.4 | Yeah, too close to the bone. |
| 0:48.7 | Katie's been on holiday forever. |
| 0:50.7 | In my defence, it wasn't a regular holiday. |
| 0:52.4 | It was my honeymoon. |
| 0:53.6 | And also, this was my first |
| 0:55.4 | August since I became a French citizen, so I wanted to really go for it. I'm happy for you. |
| 1:00.2 | And I hope you learnt lots of really interesting things about North Americans that you're |
| 1:04.1 | going to come and tell us. I had a wonderful trip travelling up the west coast of the United States |
| 1:08.4 | and then into Canada. But there was actually one moment where I really thought of you. Oh yeah? Because I was standing inside a fallen redwood tree in California. |
| 1:17.4 | You know, these like absolutely mind blowing the huge trees. Where's this going? And instead of |
| 1:22.4 | contemplating the like the magnificence of nature, I found myself thinking, like, |
| 1:27.5 | God, this would make a really good podcasting studio? |
| 1:30.7 | Because these trees have got like amazing sound quality, |
| 1:33.4 | the very sound absorbent. |
| 1:34.9 | That's funny because I have been thinking |
... |
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