Hello, this is Wolfgang Muncho and welcome to the Eurointelligence podcast and welcome Timothy Garten-Ash, Professor of European Studies at the University of Oxford.

Timothy, let's talk about Poland and Hungary.

Matthios Moraviyetsky and Viktor Orban have built a strategic alliance to block the linkage between the rule of law and payments

under the EU budget. What are we to make of this? Are they bluffing? Of course they are.

What we have to understand is that both of them need the money. Both their systems are built on

having huge, in effect, regime subsidies from the EU,

but all their experience up to now, and Victor Orban has a lot of experience up to now,

suggests to them that they can do what Boris Johnson only talks about, cakeism, that is,

to have your cake and eat it, because that's what they've been doing for years.

And they believe, and they may not be wrong, that they can continue to have a huge slice of the EU cake and to eat it.

How should the EU react to that?

Let's start with history.

I think the EU has been far too weak on this for far too long, and in particular,

Germany is between far too weak on this for far too long. In this situation, it clearly is imperative that

we get the new budget and the recovery fund. So it's a genuinely difficult situation. But what we

absolutely should be prepared to do, I still say we, thinking of myself as being part, at least in principle of the EU,

is to be prepared to go down the enhanced cooperation route on the recovery fund,

as you yourself have written Volgeng.

We have to have that as a credible threat to Orban and Moravievski and indeed be prepared to do it.

When you, I mean, you've been studying and, you know, the Eastern Europe for, for decades, and

you know Poland at a very deep level. What do you see? What do you think is Moravievsky up to?

Should we think of this as an attempt to create a one-party

...