Henry Foy
speaker
29 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2026
last heard today
Henry Foy’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Hey, Sonia.
So this past weekend, Chancellor Friedrich Merz's CDU, Christian Democratic Union Party, won just 4.9% of the vote in a small northeastern state of Germany.
That's the party's worst result in any German state election in Germany's post-war history.
This is all kind of compiled to leave Merz in a very, very precarious situation.
There are people inside his own party questioning whether he should be the leader.
And of course, it makes him very, very weak in the domestic parliament.
That's a huge problem for the EU because the German chancellor, head of the EU's biggest state, its most important economy, wields really oversized power in Brussels in the big debates over the issues that need to be decided by the member states.
And between now and Christmas, the EU needs to agree on its next seven-year shared budget.
Right, so every seven years, Sonia, the EU's member states agree on the budget it covers.
So the next one they're talking about is 2028 to 2034.
The proposal for that one is 2 trillion euros.
There are some countries that want to see traditional areas of spending, such as agricultural subsidies, development aid for poorer parts of the EU.
Other countries are saying, no, we should be putting more money into defense investment, into startups, into new tech, and then into all that,
You have Friedrich Merz, Chancellor of Germany, potentially about to lose his job.
And that's a huge problem because Germany is normally the country that at the end of the day, after all the fighting, months and months of negotiation on the budget, steps in and says, OK, here's a little bit more extra money that we're willing to pay to, if you like, grease the wheels of the machine and get a deal over the line.
And this year, people are very, very worried that Germany just won't have the clout to do it.
a great question and there's another political answer to that of course there is a french presidential election in the spring of 2027 also next year we have the polish election the spanish election italian election so essentially four of the five biggest eu member states are going to go to the polls next year and germany the biggest of the five in massive domestic crisis at the moment so
People are aware that with all that politics next year and all the elections, nobody's going to be in the mood to pass a budget, which means they've got to get it done by the end of this year so that it can start paying out in January 2028.
Well,
Well, they're in a bit of a no man's land.
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