Lawfare Archive: An Election in Germany

0:00I'm Sarah Wilbridge, intern at Law Fair with an episode from the Law Fair Archive for September 6th, 2026. Today, Saxony and Hall of State and Northeast Germany is holding state elections. Pulling has put the far right alternative for Germany party, or AFD, ahead in the race. If the AFD were to win a majority of seats, it would be the first time the far right party has controlled the state and Germany since World War II. The group's success comes despite being previously designated as an extremist group by Germany's domestic intelligence agency, and to refusal some other political parties to form coalitions with it, in what is known as the Branden Mauer, or Firewall. For today's archive, I chose an episode from September 28th, 2021, in which Drayken Schultz spoke with two experts on German politics, Constance Stolzmann-Jürler and Yasha Monk, about that year's elections. We consider the election results, what German politics could look like after Angela Merkel's time as German Chancellor, Germany's role in European politics, and more.

1:07I'm Jacob Schultz, and this is the Law Fair Podcast, September 28th, 2021. Under the weekend, Germany held elections to see who will succeed Angela Merkel as Germany's Chancellor. The results are in, but there's still a lot of coalition building to go. To break it all down, I sat down with Constanza Stolzmann-Jürler, who's the Fritz Stern chair on German and Transatlantic relations and his senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and Yasha Monk, who's an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced and International Studies, both of whom are experts in German politics. We talked about the election, how to make sense the results, and what everything means for the bigger picture of European politics, Germany's role in the world, and lots else. It's the Law Fair Podcast, September 28th, in election in Germany.

2:08All right, so Constanza, if you could get us started here, so what were people in Germany voting on this weekend? They were voting on who would become Chancellor, so the head of the German government in Germany after Angela Merkel stepping down at the end of her fourth tenure. Just give us a brief overview. We'll walk through the details of it as we go on, but give us a brief overview of how things shook out. So Germany's politics used to be extremely simple. For reunification in West Germany, we had two main parties and one small party, the center right, Christian Democrats, and conservatives to which Angela Merkel belongs, and then the center left social Democrats. And the small party, the liberal kind of decided which party would ally itself with. And so over the first nearly 50 years of West Germany, the existence you had, either conservative liberal or social Democrat liberal coalitions.

3:10And of course, and in Eastern Germany, which was not a democracy, you did have several parties, but basically the Communist Party ruled and the other ones were just there for window dressing. Now since then, things have really shifted. Germany has become much more diverse. We have a total of six parties. The Greens were created in 1980. They started as a sort of woolly pacifist ecological party. And then there is the left party, which is the, as it were, the successor of East Germany's Communist Party. And finally, the alternative for Germany, which is a hard right party, created in 2013, and which came into the literature for the first time last term around it came back in. So the question was, would Germany's politics become more extreme? Would these, would the hard left or the hard right, get more votes? Or would we essentially remain a centrist country?

4:11And what we see in was that the two big parties which used to get 40% of the vote came in almost a dead heat. But at, of course, a much smaller vote level. So in the case of the Christian Democrats, 24.1. And in the case of the social Democrats, 25.7. That's a long way away from the 40% percentage points they used to get. And we're also probably looking at the first time that they have to form a three-way coalition with the Greens or the Liberals. Because Dilingo didn't get back in, and the AFD is so hard right that nobody wants to work with it. So that's where we are right now. We're discussing what coalition to form. And it's probably going to be a traffic lights with the social Democrats in the leadership and the Greens and the Liberals tagging along. Was that complicated and extensive enough for you and your listeners? Afro-frequently so. And we'll get back to some of that in a bit. But I'm curious first to open this up to both of you and maybe Kansazi, you can go first. To what extent did what happened today surprise you? Was it consistent with what most people were expecting or is it divergent from what you

5:15were expecting? Well, I think interestingly enough, the election campaign was more surprising than the outcome. So the election campaign was one of the most whiplash campaigns the country has ever seen. First, the Greens were trending as the front runners for the first time in German history. That gave everybody just vertigo because that would have been a completely new political landscape. And they were trending really in the territory of yesterday's winners. So around 22%. And then they lost traction for reasons we can discuss. And then the Christian Democrats, Angela Merkel's parties, started surging. And in the end, the least likely party that people thought was practically already dead, the social Democrats, who had been having a really hard time for years. And for the past few months, never getting above 14% or so, suddenly soared up to the nearly 26 and won the election. That was surprising.

6:16But the fact that the left party sort of fell out of parliament because they didn't make the 5% threshold, the fact that the AFD got less, all that is not that surprising. I think what's concerning to me is that the AFD gets really high numbers in the former states of Eastern Germany. But we can talk about that later as well. And yes, I'll open the same thing to you. Was this surprising to you in any way? Well, first of all, thank you Constanza for your two or fours of talking listeners through some really boring material in the least boring way possible. That's a task I would not have wanted to do. I would not have been able to do it with your elegance. Look, I think sort of, as Constanza was saying, the outcome of the election was not very surprising compared to a week ago. The polls turned out to be pretty much on point. And so nobody sort of looked at those projections late on Sunday night when the figures were stabilizing

7:17for, oh my god, five hours earlier, I would have fought some in completely different. They were pretty surprising compared to where we were a few months ago in the way that Constanza already outlined. I would add that they are also quite surprising relative to where we were at 10 or 20 or 30 years ago. So for a long time, it seemed like there will be very stable, casual parties. In the parlance of political science, it looked like party systems across many Western democracies were frozen, roughly the same characters, dominating the political landscape for decades on end. Once one party has a bit more votes, once the other party has a bit more votes, there's some alternation in government, but the basic players are sort of well known and there's a couple of major ones. And then you started to see really bit of a climb over so for Democrats as a casual party, as what Germans call a folks party that has broad support in the people.

8:17And people prognosticated the death of social democracy and that happened in some European countries. And this for now, a French sister party of the SPD, a party socialist has become basically in a relevance and was forced to mediate and need to sell off its former headquarters because it has so little support and so little money now. And it looked as if the SPD was heading for the same thing. But one of the lessons from this election is that this is happening to all casual parties, but this was less a story in particular about social democracy as it seemed to be 10 years ago. It's actually a story about all casual parties. And when you look around Europe today, Christian Democrats and conservatives are really in trouble as well. And the CDU yesterday, and this still would have been a surprise 10 years ago, had historically bad performance. There's now no party left in Germany that can reliably get 25 or more percent of the

9:20vote. And that I think is a really fundamental transformation of the electoral system. Now that has some good things because it means that parties can search when they have a strong candidate or have a good vision that seems to speak to that particular moment. And so actually it might inject a little bit more healthy competition, we overall electoral landscape. But it also has some bad things that are quite characteristic of many forms of proportional representation. And the most important for that is that it's really hard for voters to cast a ballot to change the government because even if you're voting for an opposition party, that party might simply join the government in some kind of slightly reconfigured coalition. And suddenly your vote, which was meant to remove the chancellor, might help the chancellor stay in office. And of course you get the situation that we now have in Germany where the election is over. We know exactly what the results are. There's no Donald Trump running around saying would be outcome of the results of the election

10:23was fraudulent. And yet we don't yet with 100 percent certainty know who the chancellor is going to be because that's going to be figured out by a bunch of politicians in the backroom deals over the course of the next few months. So you have a lot of choice in which party you vote for, but you don't have much choice in what government that vote actually ends up supporting. And that problem in a way that would have been surprising a few decades ago is more acute now in Germany than it was in the past. In turn, a move to that coalition building. So can salsa, could you talk a bit about where we're at in the coalition building process? You mentioned a bit the two parties who are sort of in neck and neck in the voting. Talk a bit more about what those two parties are and what you see as the sort of off-roads for what coalition building might lead to. So because Germany is a parliamentary democracy and not a presidential democracy like America or France, coalitions have always been the way of life in German politics. It's just that the coalition leaders these days start from a much lower base, much lower

11:27vote share. And this time around for the first time, they're going to have to the leading party has to share power with not just one party, but two. In theory, three coalition models are possible, but one is politically extremely unlikely and all the two remaining one is swiftly drifting out of sight. Let me explain. Numerically, a repeat of the grand coalition that Merkel ran for three out of her four terms is possible. In other words, a two party coalition between the center right Christian Democrats, her party, and the center left social Democrats. But since the center left social Democrats got about just sort of 2% more than the Christian Democrats, they would be in the lead. I think we can at this point practically issue a cast iron guarantee that that's not going to happen because that would be humiliating for the Christian Democrats and because frankly, they can't stand each other's guts anymore. They want, as Yasha hinted, what they want and what Germany wants is a new kind of governments

12:33that solves some of the addresses, some of the issues that Merkel's government has over time left undone, in which at this point is becoming more and more urgent. And here, two three ways are theoretically possible for the winners of social Democrats to head a so-called traffic light coalition with the Greens and the Liberals. The Liberals have the color yellow, the social Democrats, the color red, and it's traffic light. The other alternative would be what for the longest time in this campaign, the Liberals and the Greens thought they were heading for, which was what we call amusingly for everybody else, Jamaica. Because the Jamaican flag is black, green, and yellow, and the color of the conservatives was black. All the parties are color coded. But, and in fact, last night in the prime time live TV meeting of all the candidates and party leaders, this is entertainingly called the elephant round in the German political tradition because you know, you used to be, these all used to be older white men who

13:38I think were compared to elephant bulls, you know, sitting around waving their trunks, snorting and flapping their ears. And the Christian Democrat candidate in the elephant round last night said, of course, I may be just behind the social Democrats, but of course, I claim the possibility of negotiating a coalition and I'm going to do this. That today looks a hell of a lot less likely. And mainly it's because of the candidates, Armin Laschet's poor performance in the election campaign, the many mistakes he made, the pervasive sense that he's really a lightweight who was well beyond his point of competence. And the entrenched rivalries within the party's leadership between, it has to be said about half a dozen elephant bulls who thought that they would have been the better chancellor candidate and sort of, and in fact, thought so through all the 16 years of Angola Merkel's reign. So it is entirely possible that the Christian Democrats will self-implod and that the

14:40option of Jamaica will remove itself from the table, leaving the Greens and the liberals with no other choice but to talk to the social Democrats. That's really useful. So I want to take a little bit of a step back. So one thing that particularly I see getting discussed a lot in English language media is the extent to which the election was or wasn't a referendum on Angola Merkel's tenure in office. Yasha, what would you say to that? What would you say to people who make a comment maybe that part of what was at stake here is a referendum on her success and her time in office? Well, I think it's hard to make the case that that was really what was going on because those three candidates, one of whom was from within the Occasional party and broadly speaking from within the ideological wing of the Occasional party, which is to say that he is sort of a moderate within the party. He's not one of the people who wanted to push the party back towards more right-wing,

15:44more conservative policies. The second was the vice chancellor in her own government, the head of a social democratic party, but somebody who'd worked very closely with Merkel and to in many ways seem to campaign as a sort of a Merkel look alike, very calm, not really pushing the policy agenda, very actively, somebody who has sort of good judgment, but not a lot of sort of great rhetorical firepower or a lot of desire to sort of be an Obama-like transcendent figure. And then third, I suppose, was the head of a green party who stood for most of a contrast with Merkel, but who themselves actually would have probably liked to enter a coalition with her party under the right circumstances, ideally with them as the senior partner and Merkel's conservators as a junior partner, and to, you know, wasn't overly critical of Merkel's legacy either.

16:45So I think, you know, there was actually a broad consensus within the main parties that it's time to move on. Merkel was in power for 16 years, and that's probably a good thing, which Germany is going to have a new chancellor, but they were all, to varying, extends quite complimentary of Merkel or these, you know, reluctant to criticize her too much. But there's also a second I mentioned to this question, which is sort of the idea that some of the American readers and listeners have that, you know, really the thing with hell Germany together for the last 16 years, the thing that explains why Germany, democracy hasn't come apart, was Angela Merkel, and that of course, raises the risk of a danger, the fear that Germany will trumpify after Merkel, that once she has left the political stage, you know, this moment of moderation in Germany, but one democracy that still sort of works will be over. And I think, as Constanza said, the very clear emphasis on moderate political parties

17:46with decline in the vote of a farad alternative for Germany, with decline even the vote for the less dangerous, but still not particularly appealing, or far left, left party, all of that shows that German politics will remain pretty moderate after Merkel. I think this is a historic election, because changing chancellor after 16 years has a historic feel to it, but it is not, I think, a historic election in the sense that it will make a big difference, either to German domestic policy or to German foreign policy. And thereby and larger have to say, you know, there's certainly a need for real reforms with Germany as a need for some change in domestic policy, but I'm not too concerned about the fact that broadly speaking, there will be a steady hand on German domestic policy, but the mix between capitalism and the welfare state is going to continue, that all of the people who are going to be in power now are pretty socially liberal without being extremist

18:49in any direction that they're fiscally responsible, but care about the welfare state, all of that is fine with me. I'm a little bit more concerned about the foreign policy end of it, because I think that actually on that front, Germany has really been asleep at the wheel for the last couple of decades, in a way that concerns me. And there I would wish for a future chancellor to come in with more of a strategic vision with more of a sense of how to have German, not just to talk nicely about human rights in democracy, but perhaps actually do something for human rights in democracy and my hopes for all of the sholds and for our minglasher to plausible candidates to succeed Angela Merkel at this point are pretty limited on that front. Concerned them, I'm wondering what you make of all that. Well, I do have concerns. I mean, my field is foreign and security policy, and I sort of undertook the fairly unenviable project of reading all the foreign policy chapters in the party programs, the election

19:52platforms of all the six parties concerned. And I do think that we end up with, if we end up with the traffic light coalition in Germany, a chancellor, Olaf Schultz and his team will have some sort of real intellectual and practical challenges in foreign and security policy and fairly soon. I mean, the real challenges, of course, are, you know, an increasingly assertive Russia and China, not just in their own domains, but in neighborhoods, but in our neighborhoods and in fact, in our own countries through hybrid forms of interference. The challenge is a transatlantic relationship, which the Biden administration has professed to renew, but where we are still seeing some fairly significant disagreements, such as on the recent spat with France and Australia over submarine purchases or the withdrawal from Afghanistan. And finally, you know, there is the sort of foreign policy calendar stuff like Germany

20:55heading, presiding over the G7 from January 2022, the in December, the COP26 climate negotiations in Copenhagen and the, you know, French elections, presidential elections in the spring and then the American midterms. All those things will present immense challenges. And I would maybe add to the mix the fact that the Biden administration has to undertake a global force posture review and a nuclear posture review, which could have considerable consequences for Europe. And if I look at the party programs of the social democrats, the Greens and the Liberals, it seems to me that consciousness of the extent and the severity of the challenges is not reflected in those programs. So much depends on who becomes a national security advisor, who becomes foreign minister and who becomes defense minister. In what extent were those foreign policy issues salient at all during the campaign? Not at all. Not at all.

21:56That's what I would have said. So we had a number of three-way national and televised debates. And the three big ones didn't cover foreign policy at all with the exception of a 15-minute segment on the Afghan withdrawal. And then there was a final so-called septel because all parties, just to make things complicated for you foreigners. The CDU is the Christian democrats of Angela Merkel actually has a Bavarian sister party. So they count themselves as two, although they're really united and their votes are counted together. And so it was a septel and there they actually tried to talk about foreign and security policy because viewers and the media had complained so much about the absence of these issues. But I'm not sure that that resolved any of my doubts, to be honest. So yeah, I mean, people worry that this election campaign and maybe the sort of overwhelming complexity and a number of challenges besetting us could make us inward looking. I would think they have some pretty good indications for that being a real issue.

23:01I very much agree with Conthanzer on these points. I like to add sort of two particular areas in which I worry about a lack of direction being quite dangerous actually for Germany and for the world. If the country doesn't figure out its foreign policy. So the first is that over the tenure of Angela Merkel in office, we have seen the rise of authoritarian populists in member states of European Union. Poland and Hungary in particular have rapidly creamed away from democracy. At this point, Hungary is no longer classified as a free country by a freedom house. And we're seeing other member states of European Union potentially following suit, best particular concerns, for example, about the Czech Republic and some other countries within the EU. And this is a real problem, a real challenge for the core legitimacy of the European Union because the block lives from the willingness of the citizens to share and pool the sovereignty

24:06with other European countries. But that is much more to ask if you essentially ask them to pool sovereignty with dictator and Budapest rather than a truly democratically elected government. Angela Merkel tolerated Fidesz, the party of the Hungarian leader as part of the same political family in the European Parliament, as part of the same faction in the European Parliament. She indirectly opposed real steps to sanction Orban for his attacks on democratic institutions. And as a result, the EU, I think, now has an existential crisis. And I don't see any particular desire from either all of Schoels or Arminglashert to deal with that existential crisis on those terms. And that I think will exact a big long term price. And the second, which may be even more concerning, has to do with Europe's positioning between

25:06the United States and the one side and Russia and China on the other side. Over the last years, Germany has remained politically aligned with the United States. It is of course a member of various Western alliance structures, the most important of which being NATO. But at the same time, it has struck a lot of deals with all the Democrats around the world. And the German government is now essentially reliant on the rest of Erdogan in Turkey. If it doesn't want a lot of refugees flooding into the country with very difficult political consequences for ruling parties, as we saw in 2015, Germany is essentially reliant on Vladimir Putin to keep the gas on for it to have enough heat for pensioners to be able to get through the winter. And that reliance is probably going to get worse after the completion of Nord Stream 2. And the German economy is very reliant on exports to China.

26:09And when you take those things together, I'm really concerned about Germany and eventually other countries in Europe or Europe as a whole, assiding into a kind of quasi-neutrality between democratic countries like the United States and the four-town countries like Turkey, Russia and particularly China. It's the sort of creeping Switzerlandization of Europe. And again, I don't see the strategic vision from Iversho else or Luscious to take that seriously, make a strategic choice and hopefully avert the Switzerlandization of Europe. And so one thing that both of you have touched on at different points is the relatively poor performance of extremist parties in this election. And Yashan, I'm curious, you mentioned that there's an election in France coming up in eight or nine months. To what extent do you see the relatively poor performance of extremist parties here as something that's reflective of broader political trends in Europe or is it if it's something

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29:15That's C-A-R-G-U-R-U-S dot com car gurus dot com. It's a little bit of a curve. So I have argued in a piece and we had landed a couple of months ago. But for the first time in a very long while, I'm starting to see some potentially optimistic trends about the fate of populist governments around the world. And again, this is very early. Things may well continue to worsen over the next years. This is not the moment to stop sounding the alarm. But if 5 or 10 years from now, there will be a positive story to be told, we're starting to see what it might look like. So in the French regional elections a few months ago, Marine Le Pen failed to win a single region, a majority in a single region. So the ability of at least that part of a far right to actually win majorities continues

30:16to be limited. In Scandinavia, in Manavillans, in a bunch of European countries, we're seeing that where populists haven't taken over a few years ago, they don't seem to be improving their share of a world they're standing now. So the danger that more and more countries might be taken over by populists seems less acute when it did a few years ago. And finally, we're seeing that populists in countries over half-ruled for a long time are starting to be a little bit less popular. But people are figuring out where the promises were often empty, where the countries are not doing better than they were in the past, and populists in countries from Brazil to a few other places like Mexico are starting to pay the price for that. And there's just a possibility that perhaps Victor Arban will lose power in upcoming parliamentary elections there in the spring. That depends on whether the opposition is able to break through despite a very heavily

31:16biased media against them, because there's barely three media left in Hungary, and it depends on whether Arban will actually give up power, which I think is not a foregone conclusion. But when you're looking at current polls, the opposition is doing pretty well, and there is just a chance that even within Europe some of these defining populists are going to start being out of office. So then you look at Germany, and they say, look, the left party nearly missed its chance to re-enter the government, and most importantly, the really very extreme alternative for Germany. So the first time in history has declined in virtue of national elections, is down by about two percentage points, two between 10 to 11 percent, and that looks like a pretty good sign. What I would add, though, is that Germany is a little bit of an outlier, that we extend to which moderate parties dominate in the political landscape, despite the continuing worries

32:17about the AFT, which are important and well taken, is a bit of an outlier. And certainly in France, probably because also on to be re-elected as President of France, but it is far from unthinkable that Marine Le Pen will be the President of France. And at this point, it is not even unthinkable that Erick Zennmour, a far-right writer and propagandist, will be the next President of France. So yes, you could see Germany optimistically as part of a trend. It's a little too early to be sure about that. I hope that five or so years from now will be able to look back at this moment and say, yes, this is part of a trend, but there are certainly also things that make Germany a little bit of an outlier. And for reasons that I don't entirely understand, the German political system just appears to be working significantly better than that of most peer countries and most democracies

33:20in the world at the moment. Yes, it is quite right to say that the AFT has done worse than it wanted to. It's done worse than last time. And because it has radicalized so visibly, allowing itself with neo-Nazi and identitarian groupings, it has become just beyond the pale for any democratic party to collaborate with. To me, as a German, I have to say, you know, the fact that 10.6 percent of German voters are still under those circumstances, willing to vote for the AFT is hair raising. And what I'm even more concerned by is the fact that it gets far, a far greater vote chair in Eastern Germany. And in fact, it rolled in in first place at around 21 percent in two of the five Eastern German states. And that, to me, is truly terrifying because that means that the established democratic parties, you know, just don't have an answer to the problems that make people vote for

34:22the AFT. That's really quite distressing. And we'll see how that plays out in the future. I do think, though, that we can consider ourselves lucky, as Yasha said, that our politics is still relatively centrist and moderate compared to others. We have, in a sense, I think, followed the trend in the rest of Europe in becoming more diverse and more volatile, but we haven't actually sort of feathered out to the extremist fringes, and I'm grateful for that. The fact that Delinco, the extreme left party, didn't make it across the five percent threshold, I think really is a result of its policies that are very pro-Russian, very out of sync with people's concerns. It has only ever worked in areas where it's seen in Eastern Germany really, where we're seen as the legitimate successor to a legitimately East German party, the Communist Party, because

35:23the other parties we're seeing is carpetbangers. But still, I think the left party's time may actually be over, and I'm still concerned by the existence of the AFD. But in general, Germany's federalism and its tendency towards moderation, the fact that we don't have the possibility to gerrymandour electoral districts, the fact that we have very strict supervision and regulation of campaign contributions, and the fact that we have generally publicly respected public media, I think all means that there is a much greater common basis of consensus in German politics that in other countries where that's no longer the case. And just to wrap up, I'd be curious to hear from both of you what you think is the big picture takeaway, the one thing that really stuck with you and you'd want to convey to listeners. Yasha, you first, I'm curious. I think, let me say a big takeaway we haven't talked about, which is that the dog that

36:23we didn't bark in this election, if one narrative outside of Germany about this election was, oh my god, Merkel is leaving, is the country going to trumpify and I've explained why I think that's a wrong reading. A second narrative, a little bit more sophisticated, but I think no less wrong, is that this was going to be the election which shows that populism is sort of a side story and really what we're seeing and going to see in European politics is the rise of a younger generation, the rise of really strong support for environmentalist movements, the green party is going to become, not just the dominant party of the left, but the dominant party in the country is going to win the chance to re because Germans recognize that the fight against climate change is the most important issue of the day and that the way to fight against climate change is essentially to admit that we've sinned against nature to self-flagelate, to promise, to cycle, to work and leave the air conditioning on not too much in the summer or actually ideally

37:23not have air conditioning at all in Germany to be a little, I can't recall in the winter to give up on the idea of flying into your holidays and so on and so forth. I think the fact that the green party was so hyped and ended up not just the third, the distant third really bunched in with the liberal party and even the AFD rather than the social democrats and the Christian democrats was a big surprise. The fact that among people who voted for the very first time in Germany it was the sort of center-right pro-business liberal party that edged out the greens and had the most votes and that actually even among voters below the age of 30 the left was not much stronger than the right when you look at the overall vote count. All of that shows that those hopes were slightly overstated and that actually we're not going to have a radical shift in at least that form of environmentalism in the near future.

38:26Other German political parties take climate change seriously as well. They do want to act on climate change, they're a very different respect from a party like the republicans but still are very reluctant on this topic. But they are promising citizens that it is possible to combine economic growth, combine fighting for jobs with dealing with climate change. The way to do that is much more through investment and technology and yes government regulation that will have more affluent and more comfortable lives 20 or 40 years from now rather than having to atone for having syndicants nature. What I think is an interesting indication of when I was just German but European politics is likely to go up at stand in contrast with how even some of the most sophisticated observers of Europe often perceive a continent in the United States. In Constanza? Well my big takeaway is I think we are going to see a German government that has to grapple

39:32with a lot of domestic and external challenges in ways that Merkel's government for all her excellence in crisis management refused to really tackle the big transformational issues. Carbon neutrality, the energy transformation from fossil fuels to renewables really coming to grips with the assertiveness of authoritarian great powers. That has been left for this next government to undertake the digital transformation. These are big, big challenges for three parties who have never worked together before in this way. And it is I think of significant importance for the future of Europe but also of the Transatlantic Alliance for this government to get it right. What happens in Berlin does not end at Germany's borders.

40:33It has tremendous impact on the stability and security of Europe as a whole and with that of the Alliance. So watch the space. Thank you both so much for coming on. I really appreciate it. You're very welcome. It's much later for Yasha but I think we've all had a long day. The Laughair Podcast is produced in cooperation with the Brookings Institution. Your audio engineer this week was Hemsa Shatu and the podcast is produced and edited as always by Jen Patehal. Please consider subscribing to Laughair Podcast. Or if you use a podcast service that allows you to rate and review, consider giving us a review. As always, thanks so much for listening.