Welcome to the Euro Intelligence Podcast. I'm Wolfgang Munchau and with me are Zuzanen Munchank and Jack Smith.

Today we will talk about the European elections. It is our second podcast this week. On Wednesday,

we discuss the French dissolution of the Parliament and the political chaos that has since ensued.

Today, we would like to focus on what we probably think the more important theme in the long run.

It is the future of the EU after the European elections

and what the effect the elections would have on the politics of the next commission.

Jack, you wrote a story this morning about rumors at this

stage, but fairly credible rumors, that Enrico Letter has been considered as a potential

president of the European Council. Your leaders will have to strike a deal on various top

jobs that are going to come up, and that is one of them. What do you think this tells us the choice of

letter or the potentially even the discussion of letter about the state the EU is in right now?

I think it kind of tells us that the desire to get the process of allocating these top jobs

over and done with quickly and with a minimum of fuss supersedes finding that maybe the best

people out there for the job, I think. You know, everybody's impression of these leaders is going

to be different, of course, and this is just our subjective opinion. I think all of us are

pretty pessimistic about the chance of Leda being a transformational level European leader or something

like that. I certainly think that kind of let us a bit disappointing when you look at the other

people who were in the mix for this in terms of who was being discussed. There was discussion about

Antonio Costa for a while for that job and as well, Mario Draghi. Of course, the issue with Costa is that he's still under cloud of, I guess,

legal trouble. And in the case of Draghi, there's the issue that he's not an actual politician.

So he's outside of the kind of equation of divvying up top jobs between the different political

families and the EU. However, at least I would say personally that just in terms of these people's actual

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