My guest is Daniela Schwarzha.

Daniela Schwarzza.

Daniela Schwarzer is widely recognized as a leading expert on European and international affairs.

She has in the past been executive director for Europe and Central Asia at the Open Society Foundations,

and before that she ran the German Council on Foreign Relations. Welcome to the

podcast, Daniela. Thank you, Paul. Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be on.

Well, my pleasure to have you here. We actually had on these podcasts chat about three and a half

years ago, and goodness me, so much has happened in that intervening period. I'd like to start,

please,

if you could try and explain to me and to my listeners, the German situation in the sense of what's been happening since the German federal elections, the election of Friedrich-Mertz,

and let's kick off by this surprise, I would say even shock announcement about the, in effect, the abolition

of the famous deathbreak. And from your point of view, what is the impact of that, following

on a court three years ago from Olive Schultz's Zeitland Venter's speech, allocating or

pledging 100 billion euros to the war effort. But What is the significance now of this new debt break abolition?

Well, indeed, so many things have happened.

And it feels like looking at things from Berlin,

that there is a huge acceleration happening.

Since the federal elections took place,

there has been a lot of movement.

And what actually happened, and that is quite unique is that the previous parliament

passed really important decisions that required a two-thirds majority of seats in both chambers

to, in fact, relax the rules that our constitution has in it on deficit and debt.

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