POLITICO's EU Confidential

Irish MEP Mairead McGuinness, vice president of the European Parliament from Ireland’s ruling Fine Gael party, talks Brexit, the Irish border and about her interest in throwing her hat in the ring to be president of the next European Parliament, if reelected in May. But back home in Ireland, just one in five elected representatives are women. There’s never been a woman prime minister, neither of the two biggest parties have ever been led by a woman, and while there have been women ministers, they haven’t occupied the big-ticket ministries of finance, foreign affairs and defense. Are things about to be shaken up in May’s elections, at the local and the European level? Following the political activism surrounding the repeal of Ireland’s constitutional abortion ban, POLITICO correspondent Naomi O’Leary talks to some of the women shaking up the Irish political landscape.

It's a summit special this week. POLITICO’s Andrew Gray, Rym Momtaz and Florian Eder discussed the topic du jour, Brexit, as EU leaders gathered in Brussels. They also chewed over Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party being suspended from the European People’s Party and the Continent's liberals entering the EU election fray. Keeping in mind that some things are bigger than politics, it’s a week of reflection in Brussels, three years on from the March 22 terrorist attacks on the city’s Zaventem airport and Maalbeek metro station. We try to gain some perspective with Flemish Culture Minister Sven Gatz, whose new book “Molenbeek/Maalbeek: A Brussels Tale” delves into the stories of seven fictional individuals on March 22, 2016. The book is as much about this "lowest point in decades" as it is about Brussels, the city, which is full of people “living side-by-side but not together,” in the words of Gatz. We also check in again with polling guru Cornelius Hirsch of pollofpolls.eu about the challenges of accurate polling for the European election.

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

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

This week’s podcast features Amal Al Qubaisi, president of the United Arab Emirates' Federal National Council, making her perhaps the most senior female politician in the Arab world. We cover a lot of territory including the blockade against Qatar and why the UAE proclaimed 2019 to be the Year of Tolerance. We're also taking the opportunity of International Women's Day to launch a special new EU Confidential podcast mini-series called The XX Factor, on women, power and European election. Listen to the teaser here: https://soundcloud.com/ryanheatheu/the-xxfactor-teaser-a-special-eu-confidential-series In other election-related news, Cornelius Hirsch is joining us as a regular guest on the podcast. He's the co-founder of pollofpolls.eu, Europe's answer to FiveThirtyEight. POLITICO bought pollofpolls.eu last week, and we'll be integrating their charts and insights in the coming weeks. The podcast panel of Lina Aburous and Alva Finn discusses diversity on-stage, tackling the question of who gets to speak on panels. We'll also debate whether the European Parliament should be conducting polling about its own future members, when no other Parliament we can find does this sort of political research.

In a week of geopolitical ping-pong we take a break to dive deeper into the politics of well-being and what it takes to be a great political communicator, with the 38-year-old prime minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern, who joined Ryan Heath in front of a live audience at the POLITICO office in Brussels. In the podcast panel we discuss the dangers of dialogue with dictators, and what a public body should do when one of its staff stands trial for raping a junior colleague. Next week you can look forward to the first instalment of new regular feature: Ryan will be discussing European opinion polls with Cornelius Hirsch, the founder of pollofpolls.eu.

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

U.K. Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt talks to POLITICO's Ryan Heath in this extra edition of our podcast. Hunt once took heavy fire from Brussels for making a comparison that invoked the EU and the Soviet Union. But he's been much more diplomatic lately in his dealings with the EU. In this exclusive interview in our Brussels office, he talks extensively about Brexit. “It’s massively in everyone’s interest to get back to stability,” Hunt says, adding that he hopes negotiations between London and Brussels will yield a revised deal “in the next few days.” A quick resolution is necessary, Hunt says, “for the sake of sanity of the population of Britain and indeed of Europe.” In addition to Brexit, Hunt discusses Huawei, Facebook, the Iran nuclear deal and more.

This week's feature interview is a 15-minute highlight reel from John McDonnell's already famous interview with POLITICO's London Playbook editor Jack Blanchard. In addition to discussing Brexit next steps and Labour's anti-Semitism challenges, the U.K. shadow chancellor landed himself in hot water by describing Britain's wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill as a "villain" for sending in the army to tackle a miners' strike in 1910. The question now: Did McDonnell successfully tackle a taboo, or simply prove that the current Labour opposition is unelectable? The podcast panel of Alva Finn, and POLITICO's new Paris correspondent Rym Momtaz, advise an anonymous MEP who wrote to POLITICO to say that the pressure of living and working in three cities (their home city, Brussels and Strasbourg) is tearing families apart. To continue the family theme, we also discuss Viktor Orbán's new policy in Hungary: exempting the mothers of four or more children from income tax.

This week we bring you the revenge of the geeks! Bellingcat is the world's most surprising and one of its most successful journalism ventures. Founder Eliot Higgins and senior investigator Christiaan Triebert explain what open source investigation is, and how they used it to get to the bottom of modern mysteries, including tracking down the Skripal poisoning suspect and identifying the people and weapons that took down the MH17 flight over Ukraine. We're joined by Dutch MEP Marietje Schaake who brought a new documentary — "Bellingcat: Truth in a post-truth world" — to Parliament this week. Listen to the end to find out how an 11 year-old's school project inspired Bellingcat's latest efforts ... in illegal wildlife trafficking. We also bring you snippets of U.S. Ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland who visited POLITICO's office this morning after Donald Trump's State of the Union speech with messages about trade relations, China and EU bureaucracy. The podcast panel discusses a right-wing politician's conversion to Islam, the embarrassing splintering of the Yellow Jackets movement in France, and what special places in Brexit hell might look like.

Facebook's new global head of public affairs gives his first public interview since starting the job to Ryan Heath. Clegg addresses a growing number of Facebook controversies and outlines the company's plan to win back trust and contribute to democracy. The podcast panel debates Facebook's efforts, the latest developments in the Macedonia name dispute, and Margot Wallström's admission that she can't forgive the British government for Brexit

POLITICO's Ryan Heath brings you two podcasts in one from the World Economic Forum — our final daily Davos Confidential show also doubles as your regular weekly EU Confidential. (Check out the other Davos Confidential shows wherever you found this podcast.) Ryan talks to Dutch Finance Minister Wopke Hoekstra about Brexit, what worries him about the EU and why people should vote in May's European Parliament election. Ryan also speaks to Sarah Kate Ellis, president and CEO of GLAAD, an organization working to accelerate LGBTQ acceptance, including at the WEF. Back in Brussels, POLITICO's EU editor Andrew Gray reviews the week's news with panelists Lina Aburous, Alva Finn and Carmen Paun. They discuss POLITICO's report that veteran MEP Elmark Brok netted surpluses from charges to constituents who visited him at the European Parliament; Donald Tusk raining on Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel's parade as they signed the Treaty of Aachen; Brexiteer James Dyson's decision to move his company HQ to Singapore; and the prospect of Brexiting Britain taking part in May's European Parliament election.

Kumi Naidoo, secretary-general of Amnesty International, talks to POLITICO's Ryan Heath in our latest pop-up podcast from the World Economic Forum. Ryan also sums up his impressions of the WEF so far and talks to World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus and Wellcome Trust boss Jeremy Farrar about global efforts to improve mental health.

Helle Thorning-Schmidt, the former Danish prime minister and current head of Save the Children International, is our main guest in today’s pop-up podcast from the World Economic Forum. Speaking before an audience at a live taping of the podcast in Davos, Thorning-Schmidt talks to POLITICO's Ryan Heath about everything from children’s rights to Brexit to her own future. Also today, Ryan chats to Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the world wide web, about abuse of the internet and what the tech community can do about it. To get more from the POLITICO team at the WEF, sign up for the daily Davos Playbook, the essential mid-morning briefing: www.politico.eu/davos-playbook-registration/ And keep up with the news in Davos as it happens on POLITICO’s live blog:https://www.politico.eu/article/davos-world-economic-forum-live-blog/

POLITICO’s Ryan Heath is back with another series of daily podcasts from the World Economic Forum. In our first episode of the 2019 edition, Ryan asks Huffpost international director Louise Roug if all the chatter about tackling inequality will amount to anything more than Davos-speak. Ex-Formula One driver Nico Rosberg tells us about the mobility revolution that drove him to Davos. And Ryan asks FTI Consulting’s data guru Dan Healy if big companies across the G20 are really ready to face 21st century challenges such as climate change and cyber crime. To get more from the POLITICO team at the WEF, sign up for the daily Davos Playbook, the essential mid-morning briefing: https://www.politico.eu/davos-playbook-registration/ And keep up with the news in Davos as it happens on POLITICO’s live blog from 8AM CET Tuesday 22nd January: https://www.politico.eu/article/davos-world-economic-forum-live-blog/