Episódios
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In this episode of Policy Voices, host Catarina Vila Nova speaks with Alberto Alemanno, Jean Monnet Professor in EU Law at HEC Paris, Founder of The Good Lobby, Trustee of Friends of Europe and 2014 European Young Leader (EYL40), about the “horse trading” that delivered Europe its new Commission. This conversation was recorded before the Parliament finally confirmed the last seven commissioners-designate putting and end to the deadlock.
It is the end of an era. As the new European Commission is all set to take office on 1 December, prepare to say goodbye to the majority that has been governing Europe for decades. As Alemanno puts it, the European People’s Party (EPP) wants to have its cake and eat it: it is being supported by the historical alliance of the Socialists, Liberals, and even the Greens, while slowly but steadily shifting to the far-right. The new team of commissioners features as an Executive Vice President Raffaele Fitto who hails from the far-right European Conservatives and Reformists and the EPP has already voted with the far-right block in setbacks to the green agenda.
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Final results are in and are devastating for US Democrats. Republicans not only won the White House but they also regained control of the Senate and held on to the House achieving the government trifecta. In the end, Donald Trump won the election by only 2 percentage points but looking at the electoral map it certainly doesn’t look like that. The US map has been swept by a red wave as Trump succeeded in winning in all seven battleground states.
Democrats have spent the last week enwrapped in a blame game starting with the US President himself. Would things have been different if Biden had stepped down earlier? Was Kamala set up for failure as she was given only 100 days to make her bid for President?
In today’s episode, we are bringing you a collection of reactions to Trump’s victory from all over Europe. We talked to people from Romania, Denmark, Italy, Netherlands, Sweden, and the UK at last week’s event from Friends of Europe State of Europe. What you will hear in today’s episode are fresh reactions to the results of the US elections as these all took place less than 24 hours after the results were announced. What stands out is a unified call for Europe to rise to the occasion.
You will hear from Ciarán Devane, Executive Director of the Centre for Trust, Peace and Social Relations and Trustee of Friends of Europe, Ahmed Abdirahman, Founder & CEO of Järvaveckan and 2024 European Young Leader (EYL40), Anders Storgaard, Member of the Frederiksberg City Council and 2024 European Young Leader (EYL40), Karien van Gennip, former Dutch Minister of Social Affairs and Employment, Simina Tulbure, Member of the Chamber of Deputies of Romania, Gregg Jones, Regional Managing Director of the Brussels Hub of Coventry University, Jon Worth, Political Blogger and Campaigner and 2012 European Young Leader (EYL40), and Giulio Barbolani di Montauto, of the European Space Agency (ESA).
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With COP29 starting in just a few days, world leaders are heading to Azerbaijan with images of Spanish towns wiped out by water and cars piled up on streets that hide the true devastation of one of the worst floods in Europe of this century.
In this episode of Policy Voices released ahead of COP29, host Catarina Vila Nova speaks with two European Young Leaders (EYL40) from this year’s class: Lubomila Jordanova, Founder & CEO of Plan A, and Heïdi Sevestre, Glaciologist and Deputy Secretary of the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP).
From Svalbard, an archipelago located 650km north of the North Pole, Heïdi is experiencing and documenting the very unique ways climate change is impacting the Artic, which will inevitably trickle down to the rest of the world. On a mission to fight climate change, Lubomila founded Plan A in 2017, developing ground-breaking software that enables businesses to monitor and reduce emissions, while improving their environmental, social and corporate governance (ESC) performance.
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Mark Rutte has officially survived his first month in office. To take stock of what Rutte has been up to since his new job started, host Catarina Vila Nova sat down with Jamie Shea, Senior Fellow for Peace, Security and Defence at Friends of Europe, and former Deputy Assistant Secretary General for Emerging Security Challenges at NATO. They go over Rutte’s pivot to the Asia Pacific and what has been his biggest challenge so far: reports of North Korean troops fighting in Ukraine alongside Russia.
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Fact-checkers in the United States have been under harsh scrutiny during the US Presidential election regardless of what they choose to do. To fact-check or not to fact-check seems to be the question but for Angie Drobnic Holan, Director of the International Fact-Checking Network, journalists should never compromise on their commitment to the truth nor should they negotiate away their right to fact-check to secure an interview. In this episode of Policy Voices published during the Global Media and Information Literacy Week, host Catarina Vila Nova and Angie Drobnic Holan discuss fact-checking in the era of misinformation.
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As much as this US presidential election has been dominated by domestic affairs such as the economy and reproductive rights – the current most consequential foreign policy issue is without a doubt the risk of a regional war in the Middle East. In this week’s episode of Policy Voices, host Catarina Vila Nova sits down with Gilbert Achcar, Professor of Development Studies and International Relations at the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London. They discuss the differences between the approaches of Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, if any, and Europe’s limited role in the conflict. This conversation was recorded on 10 October. On 15 October, the US gave Israel an ultimatum that it would limit its military aid to Israel if humanitarian aid to Gaza doesn't dramatically increase in the next 30 days.
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Throughout this special series on AI & Democracy brought to you by Debating Europe we covered a lot of ground: from the impact on elections, to rules and regulations, ethics, and media literacy. In this episode of Policy Voices, host Catarina Vila Nova speaks with Sebastian Hallensleben, Head of Digitalisation and AI at VDE Association for Electrical, Electronic & Information Technologies, to look ahead and understand what an ideal world looks like where AI is working for the benefit of stronger democracies and economies. In this episode, you will also hear from Lindsay Gorman, the Managing Director & Senior Fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States’ Technology Program, one of the speakers at Friends of Europe’s AI & Society Forum.
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With the United States winning the AI race and the EU leading on legislative power, could this be the perfect match on global collaboration? It does seem like it but there might be some unintended consequences to the EU’s regulation force with the US taking a bit too personally Europe’s take on digital sovereignty. Bu despair not as this week’s guests remain optimistic nonetheless to the outlook of EU-US global collaboration on AI. After all, with the threat that China poses to both powers, there are, after all, good enough reasons to collaborate. In the fifth episode of the special series on AI & Democracy brought to you by Debating Europe, host Catarina Vila Nova speaks with Andrea Renda, Director of Research at the Centre for European Policy Studies, and Geoffrey Gertz, Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security, on what a global collaboration between the EU and the US on artificial intelligence looks like.
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When regulating artificial intelligence, we want to make sure that the policies in place are conducive to innovation and don’t become a straightjacket. But as AI becomes a part of our daily lives, the worries that it will infringe on human rights are ever more present. In the fourth episode of the special series on AI & Democracy brought to you by Debating Europe, host Catarina Vila Nova speaks with Hanne Juncher, Director of Security, Integrity and Rule of Law at the Council of Europe, who was involved in the negotiations of the Council of Europe’s Framework Convention on Artificial Intelligence and human rights, democracy and the rule of law – hailed as the first-ever international legal binding treaty in the field of artificial intelligence and democracy – and Justin Reynolds, Director for Tech Policy at the US Department of State.
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Soon enough, you will be able to send an AI-generated version of yourself to that Zoom meeting you’ve been dreading or ask it to stay on the phone for hours with customer service to cancel that gym subscription. It sounds like a dream, right? But this also means that, soon enough, we will no longer be able to distinguish fact from fiction when watching the news.
In this third episode of the special series of Policy Voices on AI & Democracy, brought to you by Debating Europe, host Catarina Vila Nova sits down with Ben Hammersley, Founder of Hammersley Futures and European Young Leader, and Ramesh Srinivasan, Professor of Information Studies at UCLA, to discuss the importance of media literacy when navigating the AI era. -
When it comes to artificial intelligence, two narratives dominate: it will either be catastrophic or the solution to all of humanity’s problems. The reality is not so black and white and we are actually operating in a much greyer terrain. However, there are real concerns surrounding ethics and artificial intelligence but there are ways to preserve democratic principles in the AI era we find ourselves.
In this second episode of the Policy Voices series on AI & Democracy brought to you by Debating Europe, host Catarina Vila Nova speaks with Olivia Gambelin, AI ethicist and founder of Ethical Intelligence, and Erika Staël von Holstein, Co-Founder and Chief Executive of Re-Imagine Europa. They answer what are the main ethical challenges when AI is inserted in politics and how to overcome them for a healthier democracy and brighter AI future.
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With the arrival of artificial intelligence, elections are a significant area of concern. AI has the potential to supercharge the misinformation and disinformation space but as much as these fears are legitimate, the concerns appear to be overblown. Nonetheless, with the US elections less than two months away, the time is ripe for caution around the use of AI during the campaign, especially by foreign actors with malign intentions.
In the first episode of the special series of Policy Voices on AI & Democracy, host Catarina Vila Nova sits down with Rachael Dean Wilson, Managing Director of the Alliance for Securing Democracy at the German Marshall Fund, and Joe Elborn, Executive Director of the Evens Foundation, to unveil the impact of AI in elections. Not everything is doom and gloom as Rachael and Joe share solutions to counteract the negative effects of AI at the end of the episode.
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So much has happened in the first half of this year and to take stock of where we find ourselves now, Dharmendra Kanani, Chief Spokesperson at Friends of Europe, spoke with Dacian Cioloș, former Romanian prime minister, and former European commissioner for agriculture, and Pauline Neville-Jones, Member of the House of the Lords National Security Strategy Joint Committee.
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The success of last week’s NATO Summit in Washington was mostly due to the management of expectations. The Ukrainian President already knew not to expect a formal invitation to join the military alliance and had to content himself with knowing that Ukraine’s path to NATO’s membership was “irreversible”.
With that in mind, the summit was a success, even if overshadowed by a possible Trump return to the White House and Biden still trying to prove he’s up for the job. Also looming large was China’s military exercises with Belarus right outside NATO’s border.
To unpack the summit, host Catarina Vila Nova spoke to Jamie Shea, Senior Fellow for Peace, Security and Defence at Friends of Europe, and former Deputy Assistant Secretary-General for Emerging Security Challenges at NATO.
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In France, an unexpected election sent the far-right National Rally to third place while the New Popular Front clinched first place. Without a clear majority, the question now is who will be the new French Prime Minister.
Across the English Channel, everything seemed set in stone for a clear Labor victory – the first after 14 years of Conservative rule. Here, the question was not if Labor would win but by how much.
In the first part of today’s show, host Catarina Vila Nova speaks with Shahin Vallée, Head of the Geo-Economics Programme at the German Council on Foreign Relations and a European Young Leader, about the French results.
In the second part of today’s episode, you’ll hear from Magid Magid Magid, Founder and Director of Union of Justice, Trustee of Friends of Europe and 2019 European Young Leader (EYL40), about the British elections.
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The curtain has finally been lifted on who the new leaders of the European Union will be. After months of speculation, the heads of government of the EU member states landed on three names: Ursula Von der Leyen, Antonio Costa and Kaja Kallas.
Von der Leyen will most likely stay on as the Commission President and will bring with her the still Estonian Prime Minister as the EU foreign policy chief. That is once the new European Parliament votes on the new College. As for Costa, well, that’s a done deal and he will be replacing Charles Michel at the end of this year.
But what about the process that brought us here? Host Catarina Vila Nova spoke to Caroline de Gruyter, Europe correspondent at NRC, and Johannes Tralla, Journalist at Estonian Public Broadcasting and European Young Leader (EYL40). They both agree that the process was democratic because, at the end of the day, decisions are made by the heads of government.
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In today’s episode of Policy Voices, host Catarina Vila Nova speaks with Katrin Hugendubel, Advocacy Director at ILGA Europe. Katrin warns that, in Europe, we still don’t have the necessary laws in place that protect the LGBTI community and laws are very often the last line of defence of LGBTI people.
The LGBTI community is usually a target of the far-right, being used as a scapegoat, and this year’s European elections were no exception. From Hungary to Italy, the examples are many but, surprisingly, France stands as a sign of hope. Why is that? Even though Katrin is concerned about the upcoming elections, she reminds us that just a few months ago, France enshrined the right to abortion in its constitution.
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On the week the World Refugee Day is commemorated, host Catarina Vila Nova spoke with Jonathan Fowler, Senior Communications Manager for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA).
Jonathan joined UNRWA shortly after the 7 October attacks and is currently based in East Jerusalem. What he details is an intense campaign against UNRWA by the Israeli authorities. But nowhere is this situation more egregious than in the Gaza Strip.
As Jonathan calls it, “it is a war of superlatives” and at no point in the history of the United Nations have so many UN personnel been killed in a war. The staff UNRWA employs in Gaza are local staff and are themselves refugees.
During this episode of Policy Voices, Jonathan tells their stories. Like the story of a sanitation engineer who lost his family and kept showing up for work to prevent a worsening health situation in his community.
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It wasn’t as bad as every poll predicted but, nonetheless, ¼ of the next European Parliament will be made up of, to put it mildly, “parties that are difficult to qualify under one label”. As Alberto Alemanno, Jean Monnet Professor in EU Law at HEC Paris and Founder of the Good Lobby, says, in this episode of Policy Voices hosted by Catarina Vila Nova, “far-right does not do justice to all of them”. Some are “nationalist”, others “sovereigntist”, and others yet are “rebellious vis-à-vis the European process”. Clearly not the ideal composition for a European Parliament. The good news? “They tend to be disunited but they’re not going to be able to form a majority or come together as a group. This weakens their ability to influence as much as they could”, predicts Alemanno.
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In the fifth and final episode of the five-part special series of Policy Voices on the EU elections, host Catarina Vila Nova speaks with representatives from five parties on the key issue of the EU budget and the cost of living. In this episode, you will hear from Siegfried Mureșan, MEP for the European People’s Party, Didrik de Schaetzen, Secretary-General of the ALDE Party, Giacomo Filibeck, Secretary-General of the Party of European Socialists, Simon McKeagney, Head of Communications of The Greens, and David Lundy, Head of Communications of The Left.
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