Welcome to the Euro Intelligence Podcast. I'm Wolfgang Munchau and with me, I'm Zerzanuman Shank and Jack Smith. Today, we would like to talk about three subjects. The politics of the Netherlands, including the departure of France Timmermans from the European Commission back to his home country. Normally, you know, people move the other way around, but he teaches to do that direction.

Then Margarita Vestager's problems after the withdrawal of Fiona Scott Morton as her chief economist.

And finally, the expiry of the grain deal after Russia refused to renew the agreement.

Jack, let's start with Dutch politics.

Now, there's been a lot of change.

Rutter is gone or going.

The finance minister, Drut Kark, she's also going.

Franz Zimmerman seems to be coming.

So what's going on there?

We kind of already know who's going, and we're starting to figure out who's coming in.

I think now all four of the coalition party leaders are stepping down. So the three big

ones, of course, are Mark Rota, who we all know is going. Wauke-Huxra from the CDA, who's foreign

minister at the moment, is also stepping down. And then Sigur Kug, obviously, who leads D-66,

is stepping down too.

The other big thing to have happened really this week was that the two largest center-left parties in the Netherlands.

They didn't merge completely, but they basically formed an electoral alliance.

So they'll run on a joint list ahead of the next elections. This has been a process

that's been a little while in the making. They already ran on a joint list for provincial

elections and for the Senate, and they kind of basically like work together in the Senate as a faction.

That's kind of another consequential development. Now, one thing that's also happened with the

center left is that along with them joining into a single list, basically Franz Timmermans looks

like he is coming back to the Netherlands to head up that joint list. He announced his candidacy

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