In a special edition of Eurofound Talks, Mary McCaughey is joined by Eurofound Executive Director Ivailo Kalfin and Ivan Krastev, Chairman of the Centre for Liberal Strategies and permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, to look at the political, social and economic drivers in Europe and how they might influence voters at the ballot box in the European Parliament elections on 6-9 June 2024.
00:00:01 Intro
00:00:33 Mary McCaughey
Hello and welcome to this very special edition of Eurofound Talks. This year is the European Parliament elections, which are taking place in June. It’s also election year across the globe. We see major milestones in the United States, but of course in many other countries also. We’ve seen a lot of changes since the last European Parliament elections, and we will no doubt see more. The idea for us today is to really look at how these changes are shaping our lives. How will democracy respond to this? And can we see in the changes that have happened over the last period how they’ve affected Europeans and how they’re going to vote? And what are the attitudes that they will take to the poll? And indeed, what does that mean for the future shape of the European Union?
So today, I’m really very happy to be joined by our own director, Ivailo Kalfin, who himself is a former policymaker. He’s been a deputy prime minister and also foreign minister in his native Bulgaria, and is joined by a Bulgarian compatriot, Ivan Krastev, who is a political commentator and, dare I say, provocateur when it comes to certain things to do with their strategising and how the developments in the political world are emerging. So very welcome to you both.
00:01:50 Ivan Krastev
Thank you, should make it clear that provocateur is not a paid job!
00:01:56 Mary McCaughey
Well today we’re certainly not paying Mr Krastev for his insights, but we hope he will give them to us all the same! So Ivan, can we start off? Firstly, Eurofound is preparing its next work programme: 4 years, where we look at how we can assist policymakers and providing evidence, advice and analysis on how to shape better living and working conditions for Europeans. But of course, our decision as to what we research is based on many mega-drivers: climate change, geopolitical change, technological change, demographic change. But I would like you here to focus on geopolitical change.
What do you see coming down the tracks and how is that going to impact on the voters of in June and of tomorrow? Perhaps you can just set the scene a little bit for us.
00:02:42 Ivan Krastev
I’ll start with what you already have underlined. This is a very special year. Countries containing four billion people are going to vote this year. So we’re interested in European elections, American elections, but India has been voting, Denmark has been voting. And at the same time, you basically have two wars around. So this kind of relations and this type of dynamics and interdependence between words and elections is something that is affecting this year. Because on one level, certain things happening in electoral politics are very much affecting what is happening on the battlefield. But also what is happening in the battlefield, particularly in Russia and Ukraine, is going to affect how people perceive the future, how they are voting. But what we can expect from this year’s elections is that at least on the basis of the data that we have – and I know that I’m in a place where you have a lot of lots of data – is that turnout is going to be quite high.
People are interested in politics, people feel very much more confused about a world that is changing very fast, and in a certain way a world that is changing in directions that we didn’t want it to, because to a great extent The End of History was an American book, but it was kind of a European dream. We basically believe that we know where the world is going and we how it is going to develop. I’m going to just put three things that they found as the major trends that we’re going to see.
Unfortunately, this kind of a backlash against globalisation at an economic level, the rise of much more economic protectionism, is going to be a certain thing that we’re going to see. So the globalisation, at least on some level, is going to stay, regardless of the fact that of course the economies are not going to decouple. And basically the level of interconnectedness is going to stay. But this is not the trend, which also means that many of the institutions of the globalised world that we know are going to be in a much weaker position than they have been.
Secondly, while there was a lot of talk about the return of bipolarity, particularly with the United States-China confrontation, in my view we’re not going to be back to the bipolar world. What we’re much more seeing is a combination of polarisation and fragmentation. And one of the most important second trends is the rise of the middle powers. Middle powers are a strange group of people. They have a lot of things in common, but also there are many things that make them very different. This is a country like India, but this is also a country like Brazil. But you have even a smaller countries like Saudi Arabia, which because of very specific reasons, are playing an important role in their parts of the world. But they have three things in common, all these middle powers. First, they’re not strong enough to shape the world order, but they’re going to be the most active participants. They’re going to be hyperactive. And they go in a different direction and they’re going to compete with themselves. And what they’re really going to find is relevance. And what is central for them is the idea of sovereignty. The second thing that is going to be important for this group of people is that they do not want to take sides in the confrontation between the United States and China. So they’re going basically to have a different strategy of hedging, which does not mean that they’re going to be non-aligned, but probably they’re going to be partially aligned. So if the Cold War coalitions were really like Catholic marriages, this is going to be much more open marriages, what you’re going to see, and India is a great example in its relations with the United States.
And the third – and this image is very important – is that probably on the financial level, you’re going to have a period which is going to be marked by much higher interest rates than basically you have before, which is going to have a very direct impact on the things that you are studying so actively here.
00:06:42 Mary McCaughey
That’s fascinating. To refer back to that middle powers issue, you talked earlier in some of your work about Europe coming to terms or realising that this really was a changed world, that it was no longer the centre of the world, and that Europe had to adapt to that by realising it was vulnerable to being shaped by other models. Can you just kind of elaborate a little bit on that?
00:07:07 Ivan Krastev
There are certain things that certainly do not need to be taken tragically, but the reality demographically is that the number of Europeans in the world is going to shrink, not to increase. And from a demographic point of view, we’re going to see major, major changes, because this data is not sure how much we know about the democratic transition. But about the demographic transition, we know quite a lot, and we know that basically that when countries become slightly rich, and particularly when women get much more education, you have a decline in the fertility rate. At the same time, of course, even before it, you have very much a decline in mortality rates. But there is one continent in the world in which you have a dramatic decline in the mortality rates while the fertility rate is still high, and this is Africa. As a result of it, in the year 2100, according to the demographic projections, 4 billion people are going to live in Africa. By then, Africa is going to have a population several times higher than the population of Russian Federation. So I’m saying all this because this is a totally different story.
Secondly, we have the climate. And this is a major story, not simply because this is going to affect everybody, but because it is going to affect everybody in a very asymmetrical way. And we can expect quite a large movement of people. And by the way, there are places of the world that we’re seeing – places like Bangladesh or some of the islands – it is very well known that they’re threatened. But again, talking about the Russian Federation, keep in mind that the territory of the Russian Federation, 40% is frozen land. So basically we’re also going to have unfreezing in places like Siberia and others. So on one level, you’re going to have new agricultural land that is going to be low-lying, but on the other hand, all the infrastructure that you’re going to have there is going to be totally destroyed. So this is going to be a major, major change.
And thirdly, unfortunately, we’re going to see a period with very strongly rising defence budgets, and this is going to be very strong pressure. I’m afraid that the next 10 years we’re going to see the spread of nuclear weapons, because now for many countries, nuclear is becoming synonymous for sovereignty. And this is already a world. And for Europe, the biggest stories where we’re losing some of our advantages because basically, our technological change is so big that even if you manage to get to a certain level, you’re basically losing it in 1 or 2 years because the next level is coming.
So Europe is going to strive for relevance in the world, which is going to be much more hostile to Europe because for historical reasons, some of the new rising states basically see some of the European countries as a former colonial powers. Secondly, Europe should try to deal with the pressure of a shrinking and ageing population, and here the problem of migration. But it’s not simply migration of how many people are coming, but how you’re integrating them, how you’re making them productive. So the problem of social cohesion is going to be huge problem for Europe. And then politically, honestly speaking – and here Macron is right – the European Union should not be taken for granted. In a certain way, they had very different trends. And in a certain way, for the European Union to survive and remain relevant, some major changes are going to come. So probably in Europe, this is going to be the most decisive decade since the moment of its foundation.
00:10:37 Mary McCaughey
Well, Ivailo, just to ask you there, we know there’s been an awful lot of activity and debate around this recently with President Macron speaking out. We’ve got the letter report, Draghi coming up, von der Leyen’s speech coming up. Is this a pivotal moment for Europe? Will we really be seeing radical change? We’ll be looking at a fifth pillar to the single market, for example. What do you see coming down the tracks?
00:11:02 Ivailo Kalfin
Whether we can call it a pivotal stage, I’m not sure, but this is a very rapid change which is happening. If you say pivotal that’s happening once, I’m afraid that we have to accommodate to this speed of the changes around us. And as Ivan mentioned, Europe has to realise that we are competing. So of course Europe has to react. So there are two ways to react: the proactive way and the defensive way. If we see that, for example, Chinese industry – the electric car industry, etc. – is shifting the market, only defensive policies are not going to be helpful. So Europe has to find its way to keep being a leading economy, to keep attracting talent, which means to be a good place to live and work. And that’s not an easy task, because it requires changes. If we want to keep the leadership in Europe, that means a restructuring of the industrial base with the restructuring of the economy.
So what Eurofound is very much researching where the labour is going to come, where the skills, the skilled workers, are going to come. Do we need migrants and what type of migrants, and how will the whole migration process be managed? Because as you have mentioned, it’s very likely that this is stimulated by climate change, by droughts in Africa or by natural disasters in other parts of the world. So how Europe reacts to that? What do we do with these people? And then if you want to really find the added value of Europe, and I think that this is the very strong point and core of Europe, everything that at Member State level you cannot do, should be done at European level. But that means coherent societies, which means indeed public services, social policies that don’t leave pockets of marginalisation on whatever criteria, income, education, living standards, etc. If you want to really have a cohesive society, which by itself is a chain, it is a challenge. In the in the era of digital communications and the atomisation of society, everybody is focused on digital media rather than on what we could do commonly.
00:13:30 Mary McCaughey
I think, though, when we talk about change, there’s change that’s ongoing, that we can see coming down the tracks that you’re outlining. But there are also the changes that we know have happened and that we’ve seen impacting Europeans here in particular. And if I could just take us back a little bit to the prospect of the elections, you’ve described that as five tribes when you look at the different challenges Europeans have faced. Can you just outline them? Because I’m very interested in talking about how those different tribes respond differently to voting and the trends that we’re seeing emerging there.
00:14:03 Ivan Krastev
This is the story for the last 15 years, and you’re totally right. We always talk about the crisis which is going to come, but the crisis that we have experienced is shaping us. And there were five very important crises. All of them have been pan-European. All of them basically have an existential meaning for every European citizen. And all of them also have a very strong impact on the performance of the European institutions. They basically created an institutional response which was very much out of the box, and the first is climate, which has become critically important in many respects, and the European Commission in the last 5 years was very much shaped by this. Then of course you have the economic crisis, which started in 2008-09, but then it has a different evolution in that it started very much as the crisis of the common currency, but now it was much more taking the form of low growth levels and basically inflation and so on. And then you have the migration crisis, which started in 2015, but in a way it is not a crisis that is going to end easily. You have Covid and you have the war. And in a certain way, all of them are never-ending crises. So this is not a crisis that you can say we solved it – Europe managed to cope with them, and in certain way to tackle them in a way which was surprisingly effective for many. But they are crises which return all the time. And as result of it, we at the European Council on Foreign Relations try to see how people are seeing the future very much based on answering one simple question. When you think about the future, which of these five crises do you see as the most important? Because the difference between the trends that we talk about in these crises is that they’re based on real experience. Things have happened to people. It’s not about what they’re reading. It’s basically what they learn from their experience. And there you’re going to see that these five tribes, by the way, they’re kind of equal in size, some slightly bigger than others.
But on the other side, they are very different in their geography. In countries like Poland and Sweden, the war in Ukraine is something that is very much capturing the imagination. And particularly in places like Estonia, 60% of people believe that this is the type of crisis that worries them when they think about the future, but then you see interestingly about Covid – because they’re in the Covid tribe –you’re going to see two different types of people: one who believes that our medical and health systems are not prepared enough for the next type of pandemics and they’re worrying about this. But you have people who experience during Covid the arrival of a new type of a much more aggressive government, a much more authoritarian government. So there is a very strong anti-vaxxer group for whom this is a very important experience, but it’s much more political experience than medical experience.
When it comes to migration, it’s also very interesting because migration and climate are the two tribes that very much predict how you’re going to vote. If you believe that immigration is the biggest issue, and by the way, in Germany now, this is a number-one issue by far, it’s the biggest tribe, it means that you’re going to vote either for the far right or for the centre-right at best. And if you declare that climate is a major issue, you’re going to see the vote much more going on the left. This is important because they are not simply country divisions, they are also generational divisions, they are divisions based on education. So as a result, these five tribes are going to have a different vote, they’re going to vote differently in different places. But there is one thing that I found quite interesting: the immigration tribe has two groups – the ones who much more fear the people who are going to come, and the other who are much more worried about our own people who live in our own countries. And this is particularly true for some of east European countries, like my own, but it’s also true for countries like Italy.
00:17:54 Mary McCaughey
And they’re worried about the brain drain.
00:17:56 Ivan Krastev
One million Italians have left the country since the financial crisis and you walk around and see that young people are leaving. Is it okay? I’m saying this because these tribes are not going to be subscribed for a certain vote for sure. But of course, migration is really very much shaping the imagination of the right, and the climate very much the imagination of the left. And what is very important for both of them is that they both believe that there is no time, that we are living on borrowed time, and as a result of it, there is not much space for compromise.
00:18:31 Mary McCaughey
That the clock is ticking.
00:18:32 Ivan Krastev
And this type of ticking clock is something that also makes the political process much more difficult, because we have a lot of intensity and keep things in mind about democracy. On the elections, you have representation of different things, interest, values. There is one thing that is never represented in an election, and that is the level of intensity. You who care very much about the issue, and me who does not care much. Both of us has one vote. And as a result of it, this intensity is going to be much more seen on the streets. It does not rely so much on the numbers. They try to show how strongly they care about certain issues, which is also going to shape politics.
00:19:14 Mary McCaughey
Ivailo, I know Ivan has said before that he doesn’t believe to mobilise these European voters – the same people who have a vote each with those who agree and disagree – that it’s important to steer clear of the success stories of the European Union. I think that there’s an agreement elsewhere that to highlight what the European Union has done is a positive thing to show the successes. That being said, what’s very disappointing from the research that Ivan has looked at is that all of these tribes in fact seem to think that the European Union’s added value has not been significant, that it has not been that positive. Why do you think these things are not resonating with citizens?
00:20:02 Ivailo Kalfin
Well, because there is a very old story of the European Union, that national governments very much like to present all the successes as their successes and all the problems are sent to Brussels and to the European institutions. But if we look what happens again, I mean, if we search them, I think it has to be constantly on our radar. What is the added value of Europe? What could be done better at European level than at national level?
There are plenty of good examples. Take for example, this instrument that came out of nothing with the Covid crisis and the lockdowns, which was the deepest economic downturn since the Second World War. It was -5.6% of the European GDP; it was recovered in less than 2 years, in about a year and a half, unlike the previous crisis of 2008, which took more than 6 years, and it was a smaller crisis. What is the answer as to how this happened? This happened by an instrument which was created and rapidly deployed by the European Union, which supported 32 million jobs across Europe in lockdown conditions, so the labour market stayed stable and jobs were kept, instead of in the atmosphere of this whole uncertainty we had about Covid, how long it’s going to last, how dangerous it is, how we are going to live further, can we at all return to normal life, etc. If you put on top of that 32 million unemployed, or maybe less, then that would be a disaster in Europe. This disaster was prevented not by national efforts, it was prevented by European efforts.
So this is one of the examples. There might be many more, not to talk about the climate policy etc. You have a limit in the national efforts, and the narrative has to be there, the same with migration. Yes, migration is a very important topic for quite a lot of societies, I would say. Maybe in some countries, as Ivan said, and what the European Council on Foreign Relations finds in some countries is that it’s much more important than other issues. But that’s important for the council.
What we find in Eurofound’s research is that there are good examples. 40% of Ukrainian refugees are in work, and they’re working at places very often below their qualification but very much needed for the economies of these countries. So there is a way to look positively and to see how migration could be managed, rather than to provoke these far-right sentiments against anybody who is a foreigner, because these people can bring value to your country. But again, that has to be European policy, and it cannot be only national policy.
00:23:01 Mary McCaughey
That’s the issue here, isn’t it? What Ivailo is basing his arguments on is evidence-based. We know that the reaction at European level to the Covid crisis was much more successful. We have evidence and facts to show that, how it has impacted on people’s lives in a positive way, clearly not Covid itself, but the response to it. But what you’re saying is that by fanning the wings of the far right in terms of emulating these policies with respect to migration, in talking about the successes and highlighting the European Union as a positive, that perhaps we’re buying into something which could have a negative response for us if we’re not looking for this kind of far-right reaction. Can you explain that just a little bit?
00:23:51 Ivan Krastev
People are not research institutes. They live with feelings, with information, but also they live with their fears, with their anxiety. And the European Union, I very much agree, has achieved quite a lot, particularly this policy during Covid. But if you compare, for example, the economic post-Covid growth in the United States versus the European Union, you’re going to see that the United States is very much outperforming us, and then the story was they also gave money, but they decided to give the money directly to the people and not to keep the jobs. So the story is who is doing better, and in my view we cannot answer this question like this, because they have very different economies, they have very different traditions.
Ivailo Kalfin
And then the energy crisis hit Europe, not the US, which is a major factor.
Ivan Krastev
Totally. So what I’m saying is people are on one level understanding, and this is why you don’t have anti-European sentiments, you don’t have this type of Euroscepticism, which was so typical for 2017-2019 after Brexit and after the migration crisis when people didn’t believe that their nation states were going to make it. It’s simply not true that even the European Union can make it. It’s much more Europe pessimism than Euroscepticism. And secondly, many of the things that are happening are very difficult for an ordinary person to try to form an independent judgment on how it works. Things like climate: on one level, Europeans are not in denial of climate change. This is not the American right. But on the other, the moment when you push people and go into their everyday life and try to tell them, for example, you’re not going to buy the old-engine cars anymore, you should change your boiler and so on. They said, ‘What are you doing? I gave you a mandate to change the world, I didn’t give you a mandate to change my life.’ And this is the contradiction which is at the centre of all politics. And the problem with migration is that is it changing, with a new consensus emerging in Europe. One is when the crisis started in 2015, the clash was between people who believed in open borders and people who basically believed in a Fortress Europe. Both of these parties are dead. Nobody believes that you can simply open the borders, and nobody believes that you can close the borders. The problem now is who you welcome, and the problem is very much that we talked about refugees, but what we really want is economic migrants.
Secondly, how do we do it?
And thirdly, there are capacity issues in some countries, and Poland and Germany are now examples of this. This is not the public being racist; simply they reach a certain level of capacity which they needed time to digest, because there is a problem when it comes to the health institutions, there is a problem when it comes to the educational institutions.
So people need to adjust, and I like Ivailo's idea of adjustment very much. We believe that we are changing the world by having a plan for a different world, which we’re going to realize. But I do believe more and more that the problem is who is going to be the more adaptive, who is going to better adjust the world which is changing beyond our plans and beyond our wills. And the European Union of course gives much more capacity than any of the Member States. But when people are voting and this is the reality, they vote much more with their fears. And what people really hate is when governments tell them, ‘You’re doing well, you don’t know how well you’re doing, you don’t know how well we have done it,’ because this is the moment in which you’re losing the voter, even if you have evidence for this.
00:27:31 Mary McCaughey
And also when your power, as you say, is equal to everybody else. Coming back to our own work on this, we do see that from the most recent report on social cohesion, when people are faced with crises, they tend to engage more in the system, but it’s more with protest than it is with voting. We also see that with the rural and urban divide, we’re seeing more rural citizens saying that they’re not less engaged, but they’re less inclined to vote. What can we do to mobilise people in the right way without telling them that everything is good?
00:28:04 Ivailo Kalfin
There is something very strange if also we look at our e-service during Covid. When Covid hit, this was a crisis that hit all the Member States, all the citizens at the same time, unlike the financial crisis, which had different implications in the different Member States. So at that point, the trust of the citizens in the governments was much higher. They were expecting that governments, including the European institutions, would take measures. Somebody has to take measures; somebody has to protect us from this crisis that is unexpected. We don’t know how this is going to develop, how this is done. And then as time progresses, of course there might be different ideas, but more or less the reaction was successful, and efficient, both at national and European levels. In some cases, there was some overreaction probably. But at the end of the day, this process was under control.
The thing is that when it came under control, then the confidence in governments went down. So people need governments when they’re threatened, when they’re not secure, when they feel that there is a problem coming; but they don’t – cannot – assess the size of this problem. And that’s why, also in this Eurofound report that you mentioned, we are trying to see what type this divide is. And I absolutely agree with you. People are living their own lives. They don’t think about global politics, etc. They want to know about their healthcare, housing, jobs, kids at school, etc. This is the everyday life of the people. So when we see these big differences, for example in the report on the urban–rural divide, then you can see why farmers are protesting. There is a very clear explanation. It doesn’t have to do only with the European subsidies, it doesn’t have to do with the Ukrainian exports to Europe. It has to do with the fact that if you are living in a rural area, you are disadvantaged. You have much fewer public services. You have much have much fewer prospects to do whatever else. If you’re not engaged in agriculture then you don’t have many other opportunities, and agriculture is becoming more and more technological and they don’t need labour. So this whole insecurity and knowledge that 50 kilometres away if you go to the town, maybe you are going to have better conditions, but then you have the problem with housing, etc. That creates this protest among the people. So this has to be understood too – exactly what are the problems that these people have? And at the end of the day, the institutions are there to manage the problems, to control the crisis, and to provide solutions for that.
Ivan Krastev
And Mary, there is something that comes a lot from the research that you’ve been doing. When there is real fear, governments benefit. When there is an anxiety, protest parties benefit because anxiety is a diffused fear. You fear too many things. You cannot focus.
00:31:17 Mary McCaughey
You can’t pinpoint.
00:31:18 Ivan Krastev
And from this point of view, just to support what Ivailo said, Covid was a fear, the sentiment that was basically shaping people’s expectations and behaviours. We’re in a period of anxiety and anxious people tend to be loved.
00:31:34 Mary McCaughey
That’s fascinating because that feeds into that whole trust element, the trust in the institutions. And we know that’s declined over these different periods. As Ivailo said, when you see responses that are seen to be positive and impacting positively, you see trust increasing. But without good trust, social cohesion breaks down. You have disengagement. You have, I suppose, a disconnect from society generally. What can we do? Apart from communicating, but communicating ‘All good’ is apparently not the way to go either. But when we’re living in this era of disinformation and misinformation, how can we do better? You know, what is the challenge we’re actually facing there? As you talk about, anxiety is disparate. It’s not focused on one thing. For communicators, for example. Help me.
00:32:25 Ivan Krastev
Listen if I knew the answers …
00:32:28 Mary McCaughey
You’d be a rich man!
00:32:29 Ivan Krastev
A very rich man. But one thing that we know on the basis of some of the studies is that for example, trust in media in general is very much defined by whether you have a local newspaper. Because when it comes to the local newspaper, people basically should know when they’re saying the truth and when not, and when, for example – this was American data – but when they trust their local newspaper, we tend to believe that they are trusting mainstream media more in general. So one of the most important things, try to communicate based on the experience that you personally have first-hand, because this is where they can really test what you’re saying.
When we talk to artificial intelligence, I either should trust you or mistrust you. I cannot check any of this. I don’t know how it’s going to work. Is it going to work this way or that way? And this is why I’m much more ready to trust any charismatic figure who is going to come, either selling me something or trying to scare me to death. So in my view, this divorce between the first-hand experience of the people and the things that we are discussing is so difficult in politics.
00:33:35 Mary McCaughey
Trying to close that gap.
00:33:37 Ivan Krastev
To close the gap.
00:33:38 Mary McCaughey
Thank you very much. I want to wrap up. Usually we do a ‘talk to me in three’ at the end of these podcasts. today we’ll talk to me in two, so I’ll give you one each. We’ve talked about where we are with Europe, a pivotal time or a period of great change. It reminds me a little bit of a leopard of Lampedusa. It seems to me that for everything to stay the same, everything must change. So if you had the policymakers in front of you who are part of our next College of Commissioners, part of our new European Parliament, what is the critical thing that you would say to them that needs to be adapted for us really to see Europe progress and to change without disrupting everything, but so that we can continue to have the Europe that we all wish for. Ivailo?
00:34:25 Ivailo Kalfin
Well, I think that what is very important is to communicate properly. Fears create an augmented reality. People start imagining things that do not happen. So if you bring them the facts first and second, you give them the assurance that there is somebody to take care of these problems, there is somebody to help, there is a cure for their individual problems, then it might work better than saying some general slogans about how good we are and how we are going to successfully compete.
00:35:01 Mary McCaughey
Thank you. Ivan?
00:35:03 Ivan Krastev
The world is really going to change fast, but you are not going to succeed by simply telling people that the world is going to change fast. In a certain way, you should think and prepare for the world to change fast. But we should also try to reassure people that governments are in control, because the fear that governments are not in control is one of the reasons why you have this kind of a very intensive resentment, resentment without a project, resentment without an alternative. They want to be sure that somebody is in control. So this is my story: reassurance at the same time combined with a clear understanding that things are going to change very fast. And by the way, they’re going to change for us, not only for the others.
00:35:46 Mary McCaughey
So what I’m hearing from you both is to remind ourselves that people are really at the core of the European project, as they always have been from the start. Thank you both for today. It has really been a fascinating exercise to do a quick whirlwind tour of where we are at this very important time for Europe. Eurofound talks many things. Today we went a little bit more global and I think it’s been a really fascinating experience. Thank you to both Ivan Krastev and to Ivailo for joining us this morning. You can hear all of our other podcasts on Spotify or indeed anywhere else where you download your podcasts. They cover trust, for example, they cover sustainable work into the future, and they look at all of the issues related to social cohesion, gender equality, etc., which have been raised today. In the meantime, you can also access the information on our website. And indeed, you can look at Ivan Krastev’s work where he is available also in the New York Times, Financial Times and other media. And until the next time, when Eurofound talks to you.
00:36:52 Outro