So what is your take there? What do you think is going to happen?

Predictions are always difficult to make.

Last time Macron came out of nowhere and won the presidency, so of course there's a possibility.

I think it's interesting to look at now what the impact is going to be of Le Pen running, what that does within her own party but also how people will react to someone with an electronic tag running unless her appeal is successful so there there's always this dynamic which is very hard to predict and it also depends on the kind of explicit and implicit coalitions which are there what happens after the first round who's left then who's going to be endorsed by so I'm not saying it's won or lost yet but what this shows is that in Europe we have become pretty bad at preparing also for worst case scenarios and when we look at what has happened over the last years then actually the worst case scenario is usually what happens.

So I think we need to be much more prepared for what happens.

The situation is different than it was in the United States and I think This is something which we can exploit.

It is much harder for a European country, especially a European country in the Euro, to do whatever they like because the punishment of the markets is very, very powerful.

How can we explain this? Why is it happening? The numbers concretely are bad for Brexit.

[laughs]

So, um, Brussels is hitting 40 degrees today, so just to say, uh, this is rather nicer.

Um, also, uh, thank you very much to the IIEA.

Um, we have been in the PC running, uh, what we have called Project Presidency, uh, for a number of years, uh, where we have cooperation with, uh, a think tank, uh, during the presidency.

Uh, and, uh, we're very glad that we have the, uh, possibility to partner with the institute.

Um, so we'll, uh, have this event, um, but we'll also have an event in Brussels, uh, an online exchange, so very glad, uh, that we can do that.

Um, turning to enlargement, um, I think it's, uh, obvious that there is a lot more momentum, uh, in the enlargement debate.

Yeah