Hello, I'm Paige and this is the Eurointelligence podcast covering current affairs in the EU and Eurozone.

I'm joined by Wolfgang and Susanna, directors of Eurointelligence in Oxford.

Happy New Year to our listeners and welcome back. What a year it's been so far. Where to begin?

Okay, so we can start with vaccine policy, which is fast becoming a political crisis

in some countries. Wolfgang, you've been looking at Germany in Italy. Susanna, you've been

looking at what's happening in France. Wolfgang, let's start with Germany. What is happening right now

with regards to the vaccine policy and how will it impact the German election cycle? The SPD, the Angela Merkel's coalition partner, have identified vaccine policy as an election campaign theme.

Interestingly, that happened in Italy too with Matteo Renzi in a different way.

But what happened in Germany was that the SPD has produced a four-page list of questions,

loaded questions.

I mean, they're not really questions.

There are attacks on the health minister, asking him, you know, why did we not buy enough

vaccines?

Why did we do this through the EU?

Has the EU been informed that there may not be enough vaccines? When did we do this through the EU? Has the EU been informed that there may not be

enough vaccines? When did we know it? And that kind of tone, which usually suggests, you know,

it's more like an inquisition than a genuine attempt to find out what happened. Merkel defended

the policy so that the health minister Spahn.

He said we decided consciously to do an EU approach because all countries had the ability.

And if we had gotten hold of all the vaccines and at the expense of others, there would have been mayhem, political mayhem in the EU.

And they defended the decision to do the EU approach. We should recall the European health ministers decided on a joint procurement strategy about six months ago. So this was the decision

taken back then and the Commission then started to order vaccines from different manufacturers.

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