My guest is Sophia Beshe. Sophia Beshe is a Europe fellow at the Kani Endowment for International Peace Think Tank, headquartered here in Washington, D.C.

Welcome to the podcast, Sophia.

Thank you so much.

Right. We're going to talk about Germany, because you are an expert on that, and maybe informally this whole podcast will be understanding Germany for a non-German, should we say. I'm going to ask you first,

if you wouldn't mind talking a bit about the state of German domestic politics and give us a

flavor, if you wouldn't mind, of the current state of the coalition. How cohesive, how fractures

is it as we speak? Yeah, of course. I mean, Olaf Schultz, our chancellor from the Social Democratic Party,

is in a three-way coalition with the Green Party and the Liberal Democrats. And it's not an easy

coalition, I have to say. I mean, they disagree on quite a few issues. They disagree quite publicly.

And it's been a pretty turbulent ride so far, which means, I think, since we are broadcasting to not just the Germans,

which means that the Chancellor has to spend quite a bit of time finding agreement domestically

and has a little bit less capacity of being engaged in finding agreement on the European

stage or the international stage.

And this kind of coalition, if I'm not mistaken, is relatively rare where you have partners

to the right of you, to the left of you, right? The FTP and the Greens.

We haven't, you haven't had in Germany this kind of coalition for quite some time.

That's right, this sort of three-way coalition.

We've had a grand coalition for many, many years between the social Democrats and the conservatives.

But yet, trying to find agreement between three partners politically is always going to be difficult.

And, you know, the social democrats and the Greens, again, if we're talking international themes,

which I assume your listenership will be most interested in, they agree on a lot of things.

They agree on the importance of Europe.

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