Welcome to the Euro Intelligence Podcast. I'm Wolfgang Munchau and with me, Azizan Monsenk and Jack Smith.

Today we're going to talk about cars, or rather car tariffs. Last week, the EU Council approved the Commission's

proposals to levy car tariffs on Chinese cars, on Chinese imported electric cars. Germany voted no.

That was a decision taken by

Olaf Schultz personally, overriding his own economics minister, overriding his cabinet.

But it was important to him to signal that Germany should take a different view on this matter.

He's been talking about terrorists for a long time. This has been a long time coming.

Jack, you wrote about the story of what happened last week.

What is the broader context of this?

And why is this significant?

It's significant for a couple of different reasons.

But I think in terms of the actual political context, the most important one is that Germany has voted effectively a different way on this to every other large EU country.

So the vote in the EU Council happened on the basis of basically a reversal of the normal

rules that the EU uses for voting. So typically what will happen in the Council is that you

need a qualified majority in favor in order to pass legislation.

In this case, the European Commission had made a kind of decision on tariffs, and then it was up to the council to vote on whether it would overturn that decision or not.

Now, overturning that would mean that you'd have to have a qualified majority in favor of overturning it, which meant

basically a blocking minority of countries in favor of the commission's proposal would have

meant the commission's proposal passing, or rather what the commission wanted to do passing,

properly speaking. So it was very unlikely that any country was going to be able to stop the tariffs from going

into place simply through the vote.

Also as a result of this, normally when countries abstain in voting in the EU Council,

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