Hello and welcome to ETIP podcast, Voices on the World of Work.

I am your host, Bianca Luna Fabrice, and in this episode we will be focusing on the recent issue

of our journal transfer, and particularly the roundtable debate on social Europe with

leading academics, Caroline Delaporte, Maurizio Ferreira and Philippe Posche.

We will also be interviewing

Hoyschenceo that has just won the Transfer Young Scholar Award with a paper on labor market segmentation.

Right, so let's start from the very first question, and if you don't mind, I would actually

want to start with Maurizio. Do you think that the wave of austerity policies of the 2010s and their dire consequences

have opened the door for a rebalancing process than a stronger social dimension of the EU?

Thank you. Yes, I am now, I must say, more optimistic than I was 10 years ago.

Of course, I regret the fact that it took or it has taken a dramatic

pandemic to impress a social turn to integration. And we also should remember that in the first

months of 2020, after, you know, the virus started to hit the fracture, the old fracture

between the Northern Frugal Coalition and the Southern Solidarity Coalition, which had been born

during the Euro crisis already, re-emerged with a vengeance.

And nobody would have bet that in a few months the member states would have agreed or would

have been able to agree on such an ambitious plan as the next generation EU.

But in the same periods, the European social agenda was also relaunched at the Porto Summit.

So that's another reason for optimism. Of course, it was Germany, essentially what I call the conversion of Germany, that allowed for this turn, because Merkel put her force behind it. And now it remains to be seen whether the new German government will be willing not only

to support the Solidarity Coalition, but also to maintain a leadership in it, a coalition which

does not only consist of member states, but also of large segments of European

civil societies. Brilliant. Thank you. Picking up on what you just said, Marito, I think maybe

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