Welcome to the Eurointelligence podcast. I'm Wolfgang Munchau and with me are Zezanne Muncheng and Jack Smith.

Today we would like to talk about Germany's gas emergency and the instability in Italy and France following the departure of Luigi de Mayo from Five Star this week, and he took a number of senators

and parliamentarians with him to form a separate group, and the parliamentary elections in France

last week where Emmanuel Macron lost his majority. Let's start with gas first. Germany has moved to the second stage of a gas emergency.

Jack, can you just explain to us what it involves and from your reading of the situation,

whether the scenario of a Russian gas embargo imposed by Russia is now something we should take seriously.

Yeah, I think it's something that we should take very seriously. It's certainly something

that the German government is taking very seriously at the moment. So their kind of decision

to go to stage two was really influenced by a couple of factors which Robert

Habek outlined in a press conference yesterday. One of them is that even with Nord Stream

running at its current capacity, they would have a lot of difficulty filling up storage facilities

in Germany to the level that they think they need to effectively protect against, you know, adverse events, right?

You know, you need a certain amount in reserve in case you have, say, an unusually cold winter or something like that.

So that's the first thing. The second thing is that in mid-July, Nord Stream is going to be shut off entirely for scheduled maintenance for two weeks.

And the German government are worried that the Russians are not going to turn it back on afterwards, essentially.

In that kind of scenario, it becomes very likely that you face some sort of, you know, gas

shortfall through middle point of winter at some point, you know, even if you did get Russian

supplies from elsewhere. So, yeah, it's certainly I think worth taking seriously.

Also, I think it's worth taking seriously because I don't necessarily think that the Russian

governments and gas prom's explanations for what's being going on with Nord Stream add-up.

They have not been sending kind of flows of gas via other routes,

despite the fact that there's spare capacity through Ukraine. So, you know, at this point, you kind of say of gas via other routes despite the fact that there's spare capacity through

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