This is Paul Adamson and welcome to In Conversation, the regular podcast of my online magazine InCompass.

I chat informally with personalities from a wide variety of backgrounds on a wide variety of subjects.

If you like this podcast, you can go to the magazine's website, Encompass-Europe.com,

or any of the main platforms for free access to all the podcasts to date. I hope you enjoy this

conversation. My guest is Dr. Daniela Schwitzer.

Daniela Schwartze is the executive director for Europe and Eurasia at the Open Society Foundations.

And from November 2016 to April 2021, she was the director of the Deutsche

Gesellschaft for Ausvertega Politics.

Welcome to the podcast, Daniela.

Thank you, Paul. Very happy to be with you. Well, it's great to have you on the podcast,

for a number of reasons, one of which is actually, in a very, if you will mind, a pedagogic sense,

explained to our listeners, the non-German listeners, at least, the current state of the coalition talks in

Germany and how your prediction, how confident are you there will be a successful outcome

in the coming weeks? So this week, the next phase of the negotiations is starting. So the three

parties that want to form a government coalition, they have negotiated for

several weeks in several thematic groups and have started drafting text, which is going to be

the coalition treaty. But obviously they weren't able to solve all the issues. So what they did is

they handed in their

chapters last week, Wednesday and Thursday, and now the presidents of the parties and the

Secretary-General's are sitting down. They are looking at the hall and they will have to, first

of all, deal with the very tricky issues where agreement may be difficult. And then eventually they

will also start speaking about who gets how many ministries and who gets which ministry.

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