Europe’s next illiberal democracy?
The Europeans | European news, politics and culture
Katy Lee and Dominic Kraemer
4.8 • 162 Ratings
🗓️ 15 July 2021
⏱️ 35 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Slovenia, aka Katy's favourite country, is increasingly drawing comparisons with Hungary and Poland when it comes to the state of its democracy. Can this worrying direction of travel be reversed? This week we ring up our favourite Sloveniologist Aljaž Pengov Bitenc to find out. We're also talking about Bulgaria's political rock star, and a shocking attack on a Dutch crime journalist.
This week's Isolation Inspiration: Katla and an update from Death In Ice Valley. You should also check out our interview with Death In Ice Valley host Marit Higraff, from May 2018! Listen here.
You can follow Aljaž on Twitter here and read his blog here.
We're off on a little summer break! We'll be back in September. In the meantime, we think you'll love the visual version of our the first episode in our series This Is What A Generation Sounds Like, Josh and Franco, and the second episode, Denisa.
This episode was produced as part of Sphera, a collective of independent European media. Find out more at sphera-hub.com.
Thanks for listening! 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 euros / dollars / pounds a month at patreon.com/europeanspodcast. You can also help new listeners find the show by leaving us a review.
Senior producer: Katz Laszlo
Producers: Priyanka Shankar and Andrei Popoviciu
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 | This podcast is a part of Sphira. |
| 0:01.8 | A collective of independent media outlets from across Europe. |
| 0:05.7 | Some more information. |
| 0:06.8 | Visit Svira-hub.com. Well, you'll be delighted to hear that my brief career as an English nationalist is now over. |
| 0:38.4 | That didn't last very long, |
| 0:42.5 | did it? We did get some complaints last week about your singing. Saying it was triggering. |
| 0:49.6 | Yeah. Are you very sad about our national heartbreak Dominic in the football? No, I'm very proud of the lads. And I think, yeah, coming second is really good. It is. And it's much better than we did in |
| 0:55.5 | Eurovision. By a mile. When we came last. I think we should promise not to mention football again |
| 1:00.2 | for a while, although we're not going to be promising anything for a while, because we're about to |
| 1:03.3 | take a holiday. So enjoy this final episode of us talking before we disappear for a while. And in fact, you're spending some of this holiday in the UK. We're actually in the same country for the first time in a really long time. |
| 1:15.9 | Yes, indeed. I'm sitting in my parents' house in quarantine at the moment. The UK border |
| 1:21.6 | guards let me in yesterday, which was actually quite nerve-wracking. It was my first time |
| 1:25.5 | crossing the border since Brexit had properly happened. And itwracking. It was my first time crossing the border since Brexit |
| 1:28.2 | had properly happened. And it's weird. It is weird, yeah. It's a bright new era of |
| 1:34.0 | sunlit uplands that we were promised. Exactly. But this week we're not talking about Brexit. |
| 1:38.5 | We never talk about Brexit. Why did I talk about Brexit? I'm sorry. I guess this week is an |
| 1:42.5 | old friend of the show, Alias Pengov, Bittz, the Slovenian blogger, political analyst and podcaster. |
| 1:49.5 | We asked him to drop by because Slovenia's been in the news a lot lately after the country |
| 1:54.5 | took over the rotating presidency of the Council of the EU. It's a bit of a mouthful. |
| 2:02.8 | What is that? We'll get to it a bit later, |
| 2:08.2 | but basically a different country gets to steer this big ship that is the EU for six months at a time. And at the beginning of the month, Slovenia took the helm. And the presidency had an |
| 2:13.2 | immediately shaky start, mainly because of one man, the Prime Minister of Slovenia, |
... |
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