Welcome to the Euro Intelligence Podcast. I'm Wolfgang Munchau and with me are Susanne Muncheng and Jack Smith.

Today we will talk about Germany, about its newly elected Chancellor Friedrich Mertz. He got elected on a second vote.

This was unprecedented in German history. I'm not sure this is all that important. It is a simple sign of the fact that his majority is thin. He only has a majority of 12 seats.

This is not a big majority in a parliament of over 600 MPs. There are people inside his own

party and inside the SPD who withheld their support for him. We don't know who they were.

This was a secret vote. No one will ever know, or at least not until we do, but this may never happen. But the

important thing is now the government is elected. The ministers are appointed. The Mertz's

chancellorship is a reality. What are we expecting of him, both inside of Germany but also in

the EU. On his first day in office, he visited an old tradition. He visited the president of France. But in contrast to old, the tradition, he also visited the Prime Minister of Poland. So this was an important sort of a symbol, a signal he wanted to set about the importance of France and Poland as a sort of foreign policy leader in the leadership in the EU. A powerful signal. I thought that was a smart move. I always thought

Helmut Kohl, who kind of started this tradition with immediate visits. On the day, he first

got elected, he visited Mitterrand. In fact, it was on the evening of the day when he got

elected. He got elected during the day and had dinner with Mitterrand that same evening.

It was a huge symbol at the time. I don't think any German Chancellor or French President ever did anything like this.

And it was the beginning of a sort of strategic relationship.

So the question we can ask here and discuss whether there is going to be a strategic relationship between him and Macron and Tusk, what nature it will be, what it will achieve.

And the other big issue is whether Malth is still still a transatlanticist. And what we should

expect, whether he will revert to the old transatlanticism, or whether he will try to seek out a new

strategic compact between Europe and the United States. I will talk about later, about Germany,

specifically, but maybe we should start

about Europe. Susanna, how is Mertz seen in France? His first visit was to Macron. Did this get

noticed in France, to the same extent that it certainly got noticed in Germany? Yeah, it was a very

good analysis in the facts in France. There was articles in Le Monde and a little bit in Les Ecole. But

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