Brussels Playbook Podcast

Latest Episodes:

Episode 94: Emily Thornberry on Labour, Brexit and foreign policy Apr 07, 2019

Show notes

Emily Thornberry, the U.K. Labour Party’s shadow foreign secretary, is our guest in this special edition of EU Confidential. The show was recorded on Sunday in London in front of an audience at Podcast Live, an event that brought together political podcasts from around the U.K. and beyond.

In conversation with POLITICO’s Ryan Heath, Jack Blanchard and Annabelle Dickson, Thornberry calls for her party to support a new referendum on any Brexit deal agreed between Labour and the U.K. government. She explains why she thinks Britain should hold an inquiry into how Brexit was handled. She also speaks of her disgust at the latest anti-Semitism allegations to hit her party. And she tackles everything from Saudi Arabia to China on the foreign policy front. Find out whether she would ever own a Huawei phone and what she thinks is her biggest political mistake.

The show closes with a panel discussion featuring regular EU Confidential panelist Lina Aburous and POLITICO’s EU editor, Andrew Gray.

We haven’t had time to tidy up the audio as much as we usually do for our regular episodes but we wanted to get this one out to our listeners ASAP given how fast-moving the Brexit story is right now.

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Episode 93, presented by Bayer: MEP climate debate — Can the EU avert disaster? Apr 04, 2019

Show notes

Are we headed for climate disaster, and is the EU the solution?

That's the question we ask in the second episode of "EU Confidential Goes Green,” the occasional series in which we zoom in on climate and sustainability challenges.

Six Members of the European Parliament from across the political spectrum and around the Continent debated the question, and others, at the recent POLITICO European Elections Great Debate. Ryan Heath hosted the debate, which took place on April 2 in Brussels, between Mark Demesmaeker, Fredrick Federley, Jo Leinen, Marisa Matias, Adina Vălean and Thomas Waitz. This episode features highlights from their discussion.

This weekend EU Confidential goes to London, where you can see and hear the team in action: we’re live on-stage this Sunday, April 7 from 2:30 to 3:30 pm at the Podcast Live festival. Our special guest will be Emily Thornberry, the U.K. Labour Party's Shadow Foreign Secretary. You can buy tickets to our show for £12, or an all-day ticket for £30 to see up to a dozen of your favorite political podcasts. Just go to http://podcastlive.com.

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Episode 92, presented by Bayer: Amanda Eichel and Stockholm mayor Anna König Jerlmyr Mar 28, 2019

Show notes

The first of six special EU Confidential Goes Green episodes between March and September 2019.
This episode is all about cities and features interviews with Amanda Eichel, executive director of the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate & Energy and Anna König Jerlmyr, the mayor of Stockholm & president of EUROCITIES. The Swedish capital is growing fast but shrinking its emissions — by 58 percent since 1990 — at the same time.
The podcast panel dives into the Yellow Jackets, talk of a Green Wave in European politics, and asks why Manfred Weber, the center-right candidate to be the next European Commission president, is missing from the climate debate.

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XX Factor 2 – MEP Mairead McGuinness and the women shaking up Irish politics Mar 26, 2019

Show notes

Irish MEP Mairead McGuinness, vice president of the European Parliament from Ireland’s ruling Fine Gael party, talks Brexit, the Irish border and about her interest in throwing her hat in the ring to be president of the next European Parliament, if reelected in May.

But back home in Ireland, just one in five elected representatives are women. There’s never been a woman prime minister, neither of the two biggest parties have ever been led by a woman, and while there have been women ministers, they haven’t occupied the big-ticket ministries of finance, foreign affairs and defense.

Are things about to be shaken up in May’s elections, at the local and the European level? Following the political activism surrounding the repeal of Ireland’s constitutional abortion ban, POLITICO correspondent Naomi O’Leary talks to some of the women shaking up the Irish political landscape.

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Episode 91: EU summit — Brexit, Orbán & liberals — Flemish Culture Minister Sven Gatz Mar 21, 2019

Show notes

It's a summit special this week. POLITICO’s Andrew Gray, Rym Momtaz and Florian Eder discussed the topic du jour, Brexit, as EU leaders gathered in Brussels. They also chewed over Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party being suspended from the European People’s Party and the Continent's liberals entering the EU election fray.

Keeping in mind that some things are bigger than politics, it’s a week of reflection in Brussels, three years on from the March 22 terrorist attacks on the city’s Zaventem airport and Maalbeek metro station. We try to gain some perspective with Flemish Culture Minister Sven Gatz, whose new book “Molenbeek/Maalbeek: A Brussels Tale” delves into the stories of seven fictional individuals on March 22, 2016. The book is as much about this "lowest point in decades" as it is about Brussels, the city, which is full of people “living side-by-side but not together,” in the words of Gatz.

We also check in again with polling guru Cornelius Hirsch of pollofpolls.eu about the challenges of accurate polling for the European election.

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Episode 90, presented by Naftogaz: Twitter's Nick Pickles — Syria conference — AKK's vision Mar 14, 2019

Show notes

Nick Pickles, Twitter’s senior policy strategist, is our main guest. He responds to heated criticism of Twitter’s handling of free expression, misogyny, disinformation and transparency.
“Increasingly, problems have tech components, but often societal problems can’t be solved by technology alone,” he says.
We also check in with polling guru Cornelius Hirsch, hashing out the details of what could happen if the U.K. votes in the European election.
Our podcast panel discusses this week’s Syria conference in Brussels — and debates the tepid response from Germany’s Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer to Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance vision.
And following up on a recent promise, we crunched the numbers to determine the balance between men and women featured on the podcast. Over the last year, 68 men were featured guests, compared to 44 women.
Although it's not an exact science, we also had a shot at measuring total air time. Factoring in our podcast panelists Lina Aburous and Alva Finn, women accounted for 60 percent of speaking time. But when we added in an estimate for host Ryan Heath, total speaking time for women fell to 45.3 percent.
It’s not perfect, but we reckon we're on the right track.

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XX Factor 1 - Women, power and the EU election Mar 12, 2019

Show notes

Welcome to the first episode of our new mini-series on women, power and the EU election — a fortnightly spin-off podcast from POLITICO's EU Confidential.
Our timing for episode one could hardly be better. EU leaders like Manfred Weber, Frans Timmermans and Margrethe Vestager are clamoring to demand gender parity in EU institutions.
In this episode, POLITICO's Lili Bayer speaks with Belgian MEP Maria Arena about the current status of women in politics. At the rate we're going, it would take 107 years to overcome the gap in women’s political representation worldwide. And the situation in Europe isn't much better.
We also hear a debate between some of Europe's youngest aspiring female election candidates, including Svenja Hahn, liberal MEP candidate from Germany, Tuulia Pitkänen, socialist MEP candidate from Finland, and Ana Lidia Pereira, who was selected as an MEP candidate this week for her center-right party in Portugal.
Look out for our next next episode in a couple of weeks, when we'll feature women who are shaking up Irish politics.

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Episode 89: UAE parliament president Amal Al-Qubaisi — Polling guru Cornelius Hirsch Mar 07, 2019

Show notes

This week’s podcast features Amal Al Qubaisi, president of the United Arab Emirates' Federal National Council, making her perhaps the most senior female politician in the Arab world. We cover a lot of territory including the blockade against Qatar and why the UAE proclaimed 2019 to be the Year of Tolerance.

We're also taking the opportunity of International Women's Day to launch a special new EU Confidential podcast mini-series called The XX Factor, on women, power and European election. Listen to the teaser here: https://soundcloud.com/ryanheatheu/the-xxfactor-teaser-a-special-eu-confidential-series

In other election-related news, Cornelius Hirsch is joining us as a regular guest on the podcast. He's the co-founder of pollofpolls.eu, Europe's answer to FiveThirtyEight. POLITICO bought pollofpolls.eu last week, and we'll be integrating their charts and insights in the coming weeks.

The podcast panel of Lina Aburous and Alva Finn discusses diversity on-stage, tackling the question of who gets to speak on panels. We'll also debate whether the European Parliament should be conducting polling about its own future members, when no other Parliament we can find does this sort of political research.

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Episode 88: Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand Prime Minister Feb 28, 2019

Show notes

In a week of geopolitical ping-pong we take a break to dive deeper into the politics of well-being and what it takes to be a great political communicator, with the 38-year-old prime minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern, who joined Ryan Heath in front of a live audience at the POLITICO office in Brussels.

In the podcast panel we discuss the dangers of dialogue with dictators, and what a public body should do when one of its staff stands trial for raping a junior colleague.

Next week you can look forward to the first instalment of new regular feature: Ryan will be discussing European opinion polls with Cornelius Hirsch, the founder of pollofpolls.eu.

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Episode 87 — Richard Grenell and Miroslav Lajčák at the Munich Security Conference Feb 21, 2019

Show notes

This week’s podcast focuses on the Munich Security Conference, one of the big events on the global political calendar. It features two interviews from POLITICO’s chief Europe correspondent Matt Karnitschnig, who sat down with Rick Grenell, the outspoken U.S. ambassador to Berlin, and Slovakia’s veteran Foreign Minister Miroslav Lajčák. Grenell and Lajčák provided their divergent impressions of the conference and transatlantic relations. They also addressed the palpably divisive issues of the Iran nuclear deal and the general tone emanating from Washington, among other topics. We also spoke with POLITICO’s chief Brussels correspondent David Herszenhorn, one of our reporters who covered the event, to get an insider’s impression of this year’s “tense” conference.

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