What the hell just happened in Romania (and at Eurovision)?

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22 May

Romania, Poland, Portugal... and of course, most importantly of all (?), Eurovision. It's been a huge week of voting across Europe! This week we're mostly diving into Romania's election drama with Codruţa Simina, a journalist with an extremely helpful specialism in online misinformation and disinformation. We're also tackling the controversy over Israel's continued participation in Eurovision, as well as the Pfizergate scandal: will we ever get to read the text messages Ursula von der Leyen sent to one of the world's most powerful pharmaceutical bosses?

Codruţa's excellent newsletter, Misreport, can be found here.

Inspiration Station recommendations:

The EU's personal carbon footprint calculator
'Apeirogon' by Column McCann. You can find McCann's conversation with Bassam Aramin and Rami Elhanan, recorded in November 2023, here.

Other resources for this episode:

'Politics by WhatsApp? Even "Pfizergate" won’t end that' - Politico Europe, May 14, 2025
'The maths behind the public votes at Eurovision 2025' - RTE, May 18, 2025
'Wasted love?: broadcasting and fandom at a crossroads after Eurovision 2025' - Catherine Baker, May 18, 2025
'Why doesn't the EBU kick Israel out of Eurovision?' - Overthinking It, May 8, 2025
'Coal produces less than half of Poland’s power for first time' - Notes from Poland, May 13, 2025

Producers

Morgan Childs and Wojciech Oleksiak

Mixing and mastering

Wojciech Oleksiak

Music

Jim Barne and Mariska Martina

Katy Lee:
Welcome back to the Europeans, the clear winner when it comes to podcasts that keep you up to date with what's happening around the continent. Am I allowed to say that?

Dominic Kraemer:
I guess so. I mean, it's been a weekend of elections.

Katy Lee:
Exactly.

Dominic Kraemer:
So yeah, we're in the kind of winning and losing mood.

Katy Lee:
We're the winning podcast. That is an opinion, not a fact. I would like to clarify that. But it is the best European politics podcast, in my opinion.

Dominic Kraemer:
And it's not just about politics, Katy.

Katy Lee:
And it's not. It's about so much more ,as we're going to discover in this episode. This is Katy in Paris.

How are you, Dominic in Amsterdam?

Dominic Kraemer:
I am fine. Yeah, it's been a while. I had a week off. And in between, I did manage to see you in real life and almost break your foot. I'm sorry. How is your foot?

Katy Lee:
Yeah, I saw Dominic for about five minutes and he dropped an electric bike battery on my foot. And I don't know if you have an electric bike. But those batteries are heavy. Amazingly, I managed to not break it or even bruise it. So you're lucky: our friendship is still intact, much like my foot.

Dominic Kraemer:
I feel so bad. I'm really sorry.

Katy Lee:
Anyway, along with Dominic, we've also briefly got producer Wojciech with us, just popping in for a few minutes. Hi, Wojciech.

Wojciech Oleksiak:
Hey, hello.

Katy Lee:
We wanted to check in with you quickly because Poland held the first round of this pretty major presidential election over the weekend. We talked about it at length a couple of weeks ago and gave everyone a very good primer, which is still very much worth listening to, even though we've now had the first round. But yeah, we wanted to check in with you and see how you're feeling after this first round.

Wojciech Oleksiak:
Well, yeah, not great. The results of the first round are a pretty stark reminder that nothing is set in stone in Poland. The far right collectively secured over 50% of the vote, and the most fringe of all the fringe candidates pulled in a million votes on his own.

So pretty much every concern we raised in the episode you mentioned has materialized and loudly.

Dominic Kraemer:
I’m sorry to hear that, Wojciech. What exactly happened?

Wojciech Oleksiak:
Yeah. So looking at the results and voter trends, it's increasingly clear that people, especially young people, are fed up with the current political scene. And you know, as someone critical of it myself, very critical of it myself, that part I welcome. So 78% of young voters rejected the two parties that have dominated Poland for the last two decades. What worries me, however, and it worries me big time, is that many of these voters are now turning to hardcore alternatives, and they're finding those mostly on the far right.

Katy Lee:
Yeah. So the Mentzen guy who we talked about when you came on the show a couple of weeks back, who, for those of us who watch French politics, is kind of like a Polish Jordan Bardella kind of figure. He's like, you know, young and slick on TikTok. He won like 15% of the vote, right?

Wojciech Oleksiak:
Yeah. I call him junior Javier Milei. But it wasn't just him. And you probably remember our experts mentioning that Bardella would himself be very disturbed by how extreme some of Mentzen's positions are. But the biggest winner, surprisingly, was Grzegorz Braun, someone on the most radical fringes of the political spectrum, openly antisemitic, homophobic, and a fervent climate crisis denier. He secured a staggering million votes and could end up being the kingmaker in the second round, depending on whom he attacks less viciously, because he certainly won't endorse anyone.

Dominic Kraemer:
We should point out that the person who came top in the first round was the centrist politician Tchaikovsky. But what are your predictions for the second round?

Wojciech Oleksiak:
I mean, you know, now because the margin was so narrow and the two candidates from the two main parties are in the second round, it feels like gambling, especially given how underestimated the far right vote was in the pre-election polling. So, you know, the polls are not showing us something.

But to me, the clear takeaway from it is that this government has received a massive yellow card and it's increasingly coming across not as a pan-European savior of liberal democracy, as many Western European outlets like to portray it, but as a symbol of a missed opportunity. You know, for now we're watching the prolonged twilight of the Civic Platform versus Law and Justice era.

But, you know, it's going to end one day and I just hope that Polish voters find their anti-establishment champions among people more humane than those who triumphed last weekend.

Katy Lee:
Yeah. And so we've got the second round on June the 1st. Is that right?

Wojciech Oleksiak:
Yeah.

Katy Lee:
So we will be watching that on tenterhooks. I mean, it wouldn't be nice to end this miserable intro chat on a slightly more positive note. And I wonder, I don't know, as somebody who has watched quite a lot of French two-round presidential elections, I hope that this one will maybe make Polish voters think, oh my God, like there is a real chance that this Law-and-Justice-esque candidate is going to win this thing with the backing of a lot of people, we need to get out there and vote. But I guess we'll see what happens.

Wojciech Oleksiak:
Yeah. So as for the second round, you know, my point is that I think that this is just the end of this era and whether Trzaskowski wins or Nawrocki wins, so the Law and Justice candidate wins, I think it is just an advent of a new era in politics. And I just don't know what's coming and it makes me a bit nervous, but I hope that there will be some more balanced political powers showing up on the scene rather than this really extreme offers that Grzegorz Braun and his pals are displaying at this time.

Dominic Kraemer:
Well, thank you for joining us Wojciech, even if it's in a rather somber mood.

The election in Poland wasn't the only election this weekend. We had an election in Portugal where the centre-right party won, but fell short of a majority. And we had the surprise win, or kind of surprise win, of centrist mayor of Bucharest, Nicușor Dan, in the second round of Romania's blockbuster presidential election. We'll be talking about that later on in the show with Codruța Simina, a Romanian journalist who focuses on the effects of online disinformation. That's going to be very interesting.

But first, it's time for Good Week, Bad Week.

[GOOD WEEK, BAD WEEK THEME]

Dominic Kraemer:
Let’s start with Bad Week. Who's had a bad week, Katy?

Katy Lee:
Well, this is the segment of this week's show that is brought to you in collaboration with our partners at Euranet Plus. And that partnership is funded by the European Commission, who I'm pretty sure are going to be delighted that I am exercising our journalistic independence and giving them bad week this week over their handling of a little scandal called Pfizergate. Have you been following this particular scandal?

Dominic Kraemer:
Honestly, I haven't been following it as closely as I should have. So yeah, please let me know what's happening.

Katy Lee:
I'll do my best to unravel it all for you. So cast your mind back to January, February 2021. It is the height of the COVID pandemic. Governments around the world are scrambling to get hold of COVID vaccines to vaccinate their populations. And here in Europe, the EU has taken on this massive responsibility to negotiate vaccine deals with the pharmaceutical companies on behalf of all 27 countries within the EU.

This is huge. It's seen as this big moment for the EU and for Ursula von der Leyen, the head of the European Commission, which is the closest thing that the EU has to a government. Can the EU come through and show that we are stronger together in these times of crisis, that we're better off working as a bloc? It's a massive gamble.

And the EU gets off to a kind of slow start with its vaccine buying. Initially, countries like Britain and Israel managed to get their vaccination campaigns kickstarted quite a lot faster. But then von der Leyen catches a break. And in April 2021, the EU announces this huge deal to buy 1.8 billion COVID vaccine doses from Pfizer, the giant American pharmaceutical company, and its German partner, BioNTech. So hurray Ursula, good job.

How did von der Leyen manage to get this deal signed? Well, in an interview that she gave herself to the New York Times in April 2021, von der Leyen explained that she had managed to build a pretty close working relationship with the Greek-American boss of Pfizer, who's this guy called Albert Bourla. And she'd done this through weeks of phone calls and text messages.

So you can just imagine them, right? Like sending each other the latest animated GIFs, Ursula sending Albert like the syringe emoji and just saying, please, can I have some of these? The Pfizer boss similarly said that he had managed to form a close bond with von der Leyen over the course of these long conversations. At the time, he was being courted by all of these world leaders.

But von der Leyen really impressed him. She seemed to have this really strong grasp of the details of the COVID virus and its strains and stuff like that. I mean, she was, after all, a doctor before she became a politician, right?

Dominic Kraemer:
And so presumably, at some point, they started actually using these text messages to, like, work out how many doses Pfizer would be willing to sell to the EU and what price?

Katy Lee:
Well, I wish I could tell you, Dominic, but that is the whole point of this story. I cannot tell you what the text messages said, because it is now four years later and the commission is still refusing to release these text messages or even to confirm that they exist.

But let's stay in 2021 for a minute. There is an Austrian journalist called Alexander Fanta. He reads this New York Times interview that Ursula von der Leyen gave. And he's like, oh, interesting, I feel like these text messages might give us a glimpse into how this vaccine deal got worked out. And also, even though it was good news at the time that we managed to buy all of these doses, there were news reports that we paid a much higher price for this batch of vaccines than the first batch that we bought. And Alexander wanted to know why.

Fair enough. You know, it's a huge amount of public money going into this deal, up to 35 billion euros. So Alexander files a freedom of information request to the EU, but the European Commission does not give him the text messages.

And the reason that they give for not giving him the messages is quite weirdly worded. They say that the commission doesn't have the text messages in its archives because the texts are not being treated as official documents. And they're not being treated as official documents because things only get archived as documents if they contain, quote, ‘important information, which is not short lived’.

And Alexander is like, okay, I mean, like, it seems like these texts did contain important information. Von der Leyen essentially told the New York Times herself that the deal wouldn't have happened without them. But this journalist gets nowhere with the freedom of information request.

And so the New York Times takes up the challenge themselves. After all, it was their interview that sparked this whole thing. They also tried to force the European Commission to release the texts under freedom of information laws. And they also get nowhere. And so in 2023, they sue the European Commission in the EU's highest court, the European Court of Justice, in a bid to get the messages published. And throughout this time, there's this trickle of developments along the way.

So the EU Ombudsman, which is kind of like the EU's own internal watchdog, that body finds that no one really bothered back in 2021 to ask von der Leyen's personal office to actually try to find the text messages. So that's a pretty bad look. It doesn't look like the commission took the original request for transparency on this very seriously at all.

And as the months go on, there are various suggestions that the texts might have been deleted, but it's not really clear. And as it's being sued by the New York Times, in the preliminary court hearings, the commission keeps repeating this weird argument that the text messages don't count as official documents because they weren't important enough.

Dominic Kraemer:
But did the commission just get to decide themselves what counts as important enough to keep? Or what, was it short-lived?

Katy Lee:
That's the thing, like, it's, there's no oversight, right? It's incredibly frustrating. Yeah, they're deciding that themselves.

The European Commission's argument is basically like, oh, well, you know, trust us, if these messages were important, you'd be able to read them. And the journalists are like, okay, but they very clearly were important. This was about a life-saving and very expensive deal to buy hundreds of millions of vaccines.

And the commission's just like, yeah, no, honestly, they weren't important, don’t worry about it. Like, it's like talking to a brick wall.

And you know, we have been making this podcast for long enough for you and I to know what a poor reputation the European Commission has for transparency in general. There was notably a major lack of the stuff when von der Leyen was hospitalized with pneumonia at the start of this year. The way that they have handled her text messages to the Pfizer boss, that really reinforces this reputation for a lack of transparency a gazillion times over.

And you know, like, it could well be that the messages are really boring, but the efforts that they have gone to to not reveal them, including being really unclear on whether they've been deleted or not—you know, like, even if you're not a conspiracy theorist by nature, this screams cover up, right? Like it screams, well, was there something to hide here? Did von der Leyen promise something completely insane during the negotiating process? Did she maybe just send a problematic meme that she's really ashamed of and she doesn't want people to know about? Maybe it is absolutely nothing, but my imagination is running wild here.

Dominic Kraemer:
So last week, we got the actual ruling on this court case, right? After all these many years, what did it actually say?

Katy Lee:
Yeah, so we finally get this long-awaited ruling from the EU court in Luxembourg. And to the great satisfaction of everyone who has been annoyed by this, the court rules definitively that the European Commission was wrong. It should have released the text messages. The court also said that the commission had failed to explain why they weren't considered to contain important information in the first place, given that they were about something as crucial as buying our vaccines. And if they were deleted, why were they deleted? You should tell us that. You know, this is very clearly information of public interest.

Dominic Kraemer:
So are we now actually going to get to read those text messages as a result of the ruling?

Katy Lee:
I mean, I really hope so, but very possibly not, which again is incredibly frustrating. So the European Commission can appeal the court ruling and it's still not clear whether or not they're going to do that. They do legally have to go looking for the texts again, which may or may not have been deleted.

But from what the commission has said since the ruling, they have hinted that their argument is still going to be that they cannot slash will not reveal these text messages. They said they will, quote, adopt a new decision providing a more detailed explanation.

There is a slim chance that we could get hold of them a different way. So there's this ongoing criminal investigation by the European Public Prosecutor's Office into vaccine procurement. And their investigators potentially have the power to access, like, app servers to get hold of even messages that have been deleted, depending on like the location and local data laws and stuff like that. So never say never, it could still potentially happen, but maybe not. I mean, the court ruling itself acknowledged that there is a decent chance that these messages just don't exist anymore.

Dominic Kraemer:
Were they actual text messages? Do we know that, whether they were text messages or WhatsApp messages or signal messages?

Katy Lee:
We don't. I don't think, no.

Dominic Kraemer:
Because... Messages. If they're actually just sending text messages, that's really old school. I don't think I've sent anyone a text message in years.

Katy Lee:
Would you be surprised if Ursula von der Leyen sent an old school text?

Dominic Kraemer:
I would not. Very good point. Presumably, this does all mean that politicians in Brussels need to be a lot more careful about what they text or what they send on WhatsApp.

Katy Lee:
Yes. I mean, if you are a member of the European Parliament or some kind of bureaucrat, and if you are not stupid, you will now need to think twice before having sensitive conversations via text. Because even though it looks like we might not get to read the FISA messages, this court ruling does have major legal implications. This is the EU's own court saying text messages can, in certain circumstances, be treated as official documents. You know, they might seem casual because it's the same platform that you use to send pictures of your cat or whatever. But if you are someone that holds a position of power, your text messages can absolutely be considered as communications that should potentially be open to public scrutiny, and you should treat them as such.

And there are some indications that people in the corridors of power in Brussels already treat them this way. Word on the street is that the European Commission encourages its staff these days to use the disappearing message function on platforms like WhatsApp or Signal, so that the messages only stay available for a set amount of time. And they are also told, you know, for goodness sake, do not have important conversations on these platforms. That's also a lesson that's been learned, of course, by the recent kerfuffle around the Trump administration accidentally adding a journalist to a Signal group where they were discussing plans to attack Yemen. Oops. But it's interesting, there was a fun piece in Politico about just how addicted to WhatsApp the Brussels bubble is. And that habit is really ingrained. It doesn't really feel like the Eurocrats are going to stop doing politics via this app.

Dominic Kraemer:
And in general, it doesn't sound like the European Commission have really learned any real lessons from this. I mean, they're not releasing von der Leyen's text messages, at least not yet. They're not explaining themselves. They haven't apologized.

Katy Lee:
No. I mean, it doesn't really seem like they've learned anything full stop, I think, at least in terms of how this looks to the public.

I should say that after the ruling came through, the commission issued a statement saying that ‘transparency has always been of paramount importance for the commission and President von der Leyen’. But like, that's just not the impression you get from their handling of this whole scandal. Like the fact that it's still not clear years later whether these messages have been deleted or not. You know, like, if they have been deleted, why not just nip the scandal in the bud by saying, you know what, we're really sorry, yes, these were deleted messages, but we screwed this up and they're gone now, but at least we got the vaccines, right, guys? And if the messages do still exist, you know, for goodness sake, just release them. Because the longer that this has gone on, the worse it looks and the more ammo von der Leyen's critics have to throw at her.

Dominic Kraemer:
And surely it's a waste of money. Like it's taxpayers' money that's defending the European Commission, presumably, in legal costs.

Katy Lee:
Oh, yeah. And they're having to pay the New York Times's legal costs, too. So thanks for that, European Commission.

But I mean, you know, von der Leyen started her second term in office in December as head of the commission, pledging that her team would be a beacon of transparency. And you know, let's be fair, in some ways, the EU is a lot more transparent than it often gets credit for, often in some ways more transparent than national political institutions, you know. Like, for example, it is surprisingly easy to get someone on the phone or to get an emailed response about something in Brussels.

Dominic Kraemer:
That's true.

Katy Lee:
But like, this is really not an example of that. This is something that reinforces this existing stereotype of the EU being really bad at transparency. And unfortunately, those negative examples, the ones that confirm the stereotype, those are always the ones that stick. So yeah, bad week for the European Commission.

However, I do want to end on a slightly more upbeat note. I actually do think this is a good week for all of us who are EU citizens. I think this court ruling is something for us all to celebrate. You know, here is a court confirming that we have every right as citizens and as journalists to ask for information that is of massive public interest to be revealed.

And the European Commission, you know, this very powerful institution that is supposed to work for us, they are obliged, according to the court, to at least look for information of this kind when we have a good reason for asking for it, even if they might ultimately be able to provide a valid justification for not sharing it with us. We have been told all of this by the EU's own court. And that means that in this one case, at least, I think EU democracy is actually working pretty well. You know, you've got checks and balances working, you've got one bit of the system telling another bit that it needs to do better. And in a world where that's not always the case these days, in our democracies, where you've got increasingly authoritarian governments trying to make the courts all nice and docile and obedient, I think this ruling is probably something worth celebrating.

Dominic Kraemer:
Hey, that's a surprising happy twist to that bad week.

Katy Lee:
I love to serve. Who's had a good week?

Dominic Kraemer:
Well, as we already mentioned, there was an election bonanza in Europe this past weekend in Poland, Portugal and Romania, where we're going to be heading to in a bit. But it was also Europe's biggest election, the election with the most voters in the largest amount of countries. Of course, it was the Eurovision Song Contest.

Katy Lee:
Of course.

Dominic Kraemer:
And I couldn't let a song contest go by without at least a bit of a debrief. So I'm giving my good week to Austria, who won last weekend's Eurovision for the first time since Conchita Wurst won in 2014. They beat the pre-show favourites of Sweden with a song called “Wasted Love” by the 24-year-old singer JJ Pietsch, a singer who blends opera and pop. You were watching, right, Katy? What did you make of it this year?

Katy Lee:
Do you know what? This was one of those years where I was like, oh, I'm really tired, I'll just watch like five minutes. And then as always, it's so fun and stupid and weird. I was having such a good time following the snarky internet commentary that I ended up staying up way too late for somebody that has a small baby. So I had a good time as always.

I will say I don't think this was my favourite year for songs. I think there were a lot of mid songs that were like, fine. No huge, huge favourites.

Dominic Kraemer:
Yeah, I'm the same. I really don't think it was the best crop of Eurovision songs. I was actually tempted to make this segment a bad week for breath control because there were so many people singing sharp and not being able to relax their diaphragms properly.

Katy Lee:
It must be hard for you watching this as a professional. Like I don't notice this stuff. I'm just like, this is stupid and fun.

Dominic Kraemer:
Yeah, I mean, of course, I have sympathy for them all because it is such a huge stage in front of so many millions of people. I think I also probably wouldn't have very good breath control in that situation. But yeah, I thought there were some fun songs. I liked the kind of amphibious tailed singing newt ladies of Latvia.

Katy Lee:
Oh, the Latvians! Yeah, they were good. Yeah, I like them too.

Dominic Kraemer:
I also, of course, loved Finland's Erika Vikman with her not particularly subtle song “Ich Komme.”

Katy Lee:
She was robbed. That was the best fun, and like she had this mad performance where she had to be dangling in the air from a giant microphone. It was impressive.

Dominic Kraemer:
Yeah, I also think she was robbed. The presenters were also great. It was as mad and camp as usual and I had that annual intense feeling of being part of a European community in a way that I only really get when watching Eurovision or when we've organised a live show of our own podcast.

Katy Lee:
Yeah, me too. I do wonder what you actually make of the winning song. I mean, if there's somebody on this team who is an opera expert, it's not me. I didn't love the singing. You know, he was just this like, this is warbling and a really high pitched voice while on the boat. He just seemed like he was in trouble on a boat and they didn't get it.

[CLIP OF “WASTED LOVE”]

But he does have this obviously operatic training, JJ. Did you have a good technique?

Dominic Kraemer:
Well, he's got a really full and incredibly impressively high voice for a countertenor, or maybe he's even a male soprano. I personally don't love the song or his singing, but I am really happy for him. And he's clearly a very virtuosic vocal performer. And he clearly does have quite good breath control. He actually studies with a really quite famous and celebrated Wagnerian soprano called Linda Watson in Vienna. But yes, JJ is the real deal. He's actually sung in a few productions at the Vienna State Opera, which is one of the most respected opera houses in the world. And actually, we don't know yet which city will host Eurovision next year. But I have a wildcard idea.

Katy Lee:
Go on.

Dominic Kraemer:
Why don't they host it at the Vienna State Opera?

Katy Lee:
How many people does that hold?

Dominic Kraemer:
Not enough.

Katy Lee:
Okay.

Dominic Kraemer:
It’s clearly not as big as the stadiums and everyone would have to scale down their set pieces. Fewer people would be able to be there in person.

But wouldn't it be cool to do a Eurovision where everyone is accompanied by the Vienna Philharmonic? It would be like an amazing mashup of high and low European culture. It would bring Eurovision back to its roots where there was always a live orchestra.

And it might be cheaper than doing it in a stadium, which might be necessary because apparently Austria's broadcasters are in some pretty serious financial trouble at the moment and are quite concerned about spending the estimated 30 million euros.

Katy Lee:
Is that how much it costs? Oof.

Dominic Kraemer:
Yeah. But in all honesty, I actually think Eurovision does feel like it needs a bit of a shake up. And I think I would go as far as saying as Eurovision is in a bit of a state of crisis or a state of disrepute, depending on how you look at it due to the continued involvement of Israel in the competition. A country that is committing genocide according to countless NGOs and genocide specialists and even a special committee of the United Nations. There were, just as there were last year, protests in the host city, this time of Basel, against Israel's involvement in the song contest. There were actually two people who attempted to throw paint within the stadium during the grand final on stage during Israel's performance and yeah, got into a kerfuffle with some security guards.

Katy Lee:
And I have to say it was really strange watching it on television. You had no sense that there was anything going on. It looked very smooth. And you know, we saw no Palestinian flags waving when afterwards—

Dominic Kraemer:
We did.

Katy Lee:
Oh, did we? On TV?

Dominic Kraemer:
Yeah, well, at least in the semifinals, I spotted some quite prominent Palestinian flags. Audience members were allowed to bring Palestinian flags in.

Katy Lee:
Okay, interesting. I didn't spot any. And yeah, it just it felt like what we were seeing on the screen didn't quite match the reality. And that, to me felt political. I know there's this whole thing of like, oh, well, you know, politics shouldn't get involved, so Israel should be allowed to still be there. But them being there at this point is a political choice, I feel. So yeah, it felt really, really strange.

Dominic Kraemer:
Yeah. And they have that anti-booing technology, which we've talked about on the show before. So even if the audience are booing a certain act, and in this case, it seems like they were booing Israel, you don't hear it at home.

Katy Lee:
Yeah. But I saw that some of the national broadcasters who are part of the EBU, the European Broadcasting Union that organises Eurovision, they had raised questions over Israel still—still—being part of this competition, right?

Dominic Kraemer:
Yeah, they did. The broadcasters from Ireland, Spain and Slovenia had all questioned Israel's involvement in advance. And the Spanish broadcaster was actually threatened with punitive fines after its commentators mentioned the victims in Gaza during their commentary for the contest's second semifinal.

The Spanish broadcaster, however, did not back down. They put up a statement for 16 seconds before their coverage of the Grand Final that read, when human rights are at stake, silence is not an option, peace and justice for Palestine. So Spain could be facing some quite hefty fines from the European Broadcasting Union.

Katy Lee:
And just to clarify, like, why is what they did, the Spanish broadcaster, like, why is that against the rules?

Dominic Kraemer:
Well, the EBU refer to this long running principle that you mentioned that Eurovision is supposedly a non-political event. The official rules state that broadcasters have a responsibility to make sure the competition is not politicised.

But yeah, keeping the event strictly non-political is something that in reality has always been a struggle. Politics in its many different forms often finds a way to creep into the contest. And yeah, as you suggested already, many people would argue that it's a political statement allowing Israel to compete.

There was also significant pushback just before the competition started when more than 70 former Eurovision performers delivered a letter to the European Broadcasting Union calling for Israel to be removed from the competition in solidarity with Palestine. The letter accused Israel's public broadcaster, Kan, who represent Israel at Eurovision, of being complicit in Israel's genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza. And they said, ‘We believe in the unifying power of music, which is why we refuse to allow music to be used as a tool to whitewash crimes against humanity.’

Katy Lee:
Did the EBU actually respond to this letter? Have they said anything?

Dominic Kraemer:
Yeah, they did. They said that they ‘understand the concerns and deeply held views around the current conflict in the Middle East’. And they said that ‘the contest remains at its heart, a universal event that promotes connections, diversity and inclusion through music’.

They also state that ‘the EBU is an association of public service broadcasters, not governments’. Public service broadcasters who are all eligible to participate in Eurovision each year if they meet the requisite requirements. They say, quote, ‘it is not our role to make comparisons between conflicts’.

Katy Lee:
Comparisons between conflicts. I mean, that that's presumably a reference to the fact that they did decide to kick Russia out of the competition in, when was it, 2022 after the full scale invasion of Ukraine, right? What I mean, what is behind this different treatment for Russia and Israel, do you think?

Dominic Kraemer:
Well, they are, of course, completely different situations. There just isn't up until now the same consensus in Europe that Israel should be excluded from these kind of events, at least not amongst our politicians. In fact, quite the opposite. I actually saw that quite a few members of the Dutch government were cheering on the Israeli contestant on Twitter during the final. If you think back to the Russia situation, Russia were kicked out when there was a widespread consensus from politicians across the political spectrum, across so much of Europe that Russia needed to be stopped, to be ostracized, excluded and isolated. If the EU, or even if a large chunk of the countries that take part in Eurovision, were putting up sanctions against Israel, which many people believe they should, then it would immediately open the door to Israel being kicked out of the competition. But nothing like that has happened yet. So I don't think it's that surprising that it hasn't happened.

There was this week, however, a very high profile person that came out and called for Israel to be pushed out of Eurovision, the Spanish Prime Minister, Pedro Sanchez. He was, I think, the first leader of a European country to say so. He said that culture must not have double standards, and he brought up the Russia example. So maybe this is the beginning of a wave of high-profile calls for Israel not to be in the competition next year. But I'm skeptical that's going to happen immediately. Although who knows what will happen now that Israel are launching an intense ground offensive in Gaza after 11 weeks of not allowing aid to get in.

Katy Lee:
And a situation on the ground that is just getting more horrific by the day. I mean, I was actually pretty shocked. I woke up the next morning. I didn't stay awake for the results. I watched all the performances and then probably fell asleep. But I was amazed to wake up and find that Israel got like super close to winning, right? They came second overall. They actually won the public vote. Is this really, like, a reflection of how Europeans feel about Israel? Like, what just happened?

Dominic Kraemer:
Yeah. So just to quickly explain for the Eurovision virgins out there, the current Eurovision rules are that half of their votes are cast by national juries of industry professionals, and the other half come from the general public. So the Israeli song came 14th in the jury votes, but Israel won the public vote by quite a high margin.

The Israeli song was a song called “New Day Will Rise,” sung by a survivor of the October the 7th attacks, Yuval Raphael. She was at the Nova Sukkot gathering music festival when it got attacked on October the 7th and had an absolutely horrifying experience. But the fact that Israel won the public vote was, I think, quite a surprise for quite a lot of people because well, maybe it's a subjective thing to say, but I don't think it was one of the best songs despite Yuval's harrowing personal story.

Katy Lee:
I mean, what do you think explains why Israel did so well with the public vote?

Dominic Kraemer:
Yeah, that was something I really wanted to work out after these results came out because I was one of those people that thought, whoa, I really must live in a bubble if apparently Israel is getting so much support from the public at a time when so many people around me in my life are considering boycotting Eurovision or actually boycotting it because of Israel's involvement. I've seen that some of the media are indeed framing it like this, that these results are an indicator that the pro-Palestinian movement in Europe is smaller than you think and that Israel has more support amongst Europeans than the media lead you to believe.

But I don't buy this framing. And I listened to a fascinating interview with Polster Kevin Cunningham on Ireland's RTE radio channel undermining that framing by really diving into the data. He said that based on the data they have from previous years, only about 6-7% of Eurovision viewers actually vote. So he says we have to think about motivated reasoning, something that occurs in elections with very low turnout, that the people who are most motivated or most interested have a bigger influence.

This is even more the case in Eurovision than real political elections because in Eurovision you can vote up to 20 times with each payment method you have. So if you are highly motivated to vote, you can have an outsized influence on the result.

Katy Lee:
And especially in a year like this year where, you know, I voted in previous years, and I didn't vote this year because there just wasn't a song I felt super strongly about.

Dominic Kraemer:
Yeah, that's true. And that's another thing he talks about, which is this idea that there are diffuse alternatives. If you're really going there to show support for Israel, then you give your vote to that one country. But for people who want to show support for Palestine, for example, if they really are voting politically, there's no clear alternative for them to vote for. Another thing that was really interesting from his interview was that he pointed out from historical data that an act that comes in around second usually gets about 13 to 14 percent of the votes cast. So it might be a bit more in this case because Israel came first in the public voting. But still, if it's somewhere roughly in the region of 14 percent of the people who voted, you have to realize, a large proportion of voters are voting for others and an even larger proportion of viewers are not voting at all.

Katy Lee:
And as you said, you know, the jury result for Israel was much lower than its public vote, right? So the professionals clearly didn't agree with the public on this.

Dominic Kraemer:
Yeah. And it's the second year in a row that that's happened. Israel's jury vote is significantly lower than the vote it gets from the public.

And because of that, there are now calls from a number of countries for there to be an examination of whether the current televoting system is functioning, including from the broadcasters of Finland, Spain, Belgium and Iceland. And another thing that's worth mentioning about Israel's success with the public vote is that there is evidence for the second year running of a big paid advertising campaign supported by Israeli state institutions.

Katy Lee:
Oh, really?

Dominic Kraemer:
Now, I should I should point out that that doesn't seem to be against the rules and it's not totally unusual. Apparently, the UK had a really successful paid campaign when Sam Ryder came second in Eurovision a few years ago. And Malta also invested quite a lot of money this year, but not very successfully.

But the fact that the Israeli candidate has been so successful two years running with the public has raised questions about this campaigning and Eurovision specialist Catherine Baker has found evidence to suggest that the Israeli entry appears to have been supported by a larger scale state sponsored digital advertising campaign than any other entry in Basel. And yeah, because people can vote 20 times if they are really motivated to do so or convinced to do so by an advert, mobilising just a small fraction of viewers to vote those 20 times can make a huge difference with the results.

Katy Lee:
I mean, the paid operation, this is starting to sound a little bit like the Romanian election here, more on which later. But I mean, between that and the fact that people can vote 20 times and that, you know, a small number of people are going to do that for Israel…in conclusion, you're basically saying there's a bunch of stuff with the way that Eurovision's democratic process works that needs fixing.

Dominic Kraemer:
Yeah, I guess I am. Or at least I'm convinced by many clever Eurovision analysts who are also saying that.

Katy Lee:
Can we go back for a second to the question of Israel's involvement in general in the competition? You mentioned that EBU broadcasters might struggle to reach a consensus over kicking out Israel unless there is like a broader political consensus within Europe on sanctioning Israel, and that frankly feels quite far off in Europe right now. Are there any other reasons why they might not want to kick out Israel? Is there something else going on here?

Dominic Kraemer:
Yeah, interesting question. A lot of people write online that Eurovision might not be taking seriously the idea of kicking out Israel because one of Eurovision's main sponsors is Moroccanoil, which is an Israeli-owned company.

Katy Lee:
This is the haircare brand, right?

Dominic Kraemer:
Exactly, yeah. And I can't really comment on that because there is no evidence I've seen that that is the case in EBU's internal decision-making.

There is, however, one other interesting reason why the EBU could be reluctant to kick out Israel. And this one I learned about from an excellent YouTube short on the Overthinking It channel. And that is the argument that the EBU could be keeping Israel in Eurovision in order to keep Israel's Kan broadcaster as a public independent news organization. This is a bit complicated, but in order to be a member organization of the EBU, you have to meet certain standards of journalistic independence. And there are some that believe that if Israel is kicked out of Eurovision, Kan would be shut down by the government. So some people are saying EBU is like protecting Kan, but then other people say, yeah, well, Cannes is already not doing great journalism when it comes to covering the war in Gaza. So if you really want to get into the nitty gritty of that, then I'll share a link to that short in the show notes. It's a really good explanation and a piece of nuance around why Israel may be being kept in the competition that people maybe don't realize.

Katy Lee:
I do also wonder whether there might now be a deeper conversation within the EBU about Israel being still a part of this competition. Because like, it is crazy how close Israel came to actually winning this thing, right? And that would have just looked really, really bizarre, I think.

Dominic Kraemer:
Yeah, indeed. As I said, I'm skeptical that the EBU will do anything unless something changes significantly in the geopolitical context. But I guess there is a world where enough public broadcasters could start placing enough pressure on the EBU to form a consensus to kick Israel out even without that happening.

And I mean, as we mentioned, things are getting more and more gruesome in Gaza by the day. Over 53,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel since October 2023. And it does feel like we are at a bit of an inflection point. More European politicians are standing up and distancing themselves from the Israeli government, some even daring to accuse Israel of genocide. And this happens just as Netanyahu and his far-right cabinet become bolder in their statements and Israel's goals of the war become ever more violent.

If Israel had won the competition, which it nearly did, the Song Festival would have been in a huge crisis. And I was speaking to some people who said maybe Israel should have won. Maybe that's what needed to happen in order to help this competition and the organisers realise that Israel hosting a song festival is not an option after all they've done and continue to do in Gaza.

Katy Lee:
Sorry, this was a good week?

Dominic Kraemer:
Yeah, sorry, I got distracted. Shall I end this by giving you some fun cheering statistics from this year's competition to make it feel a bit more like a good week?

Katy Lee:
Oh, please do.

Dominic Kraemer:
Okay. This year's competition had songs in more languages than ever before. 20 languages were sung on the main stage. We had Montenegrin, Icelandic and even the Gegg dialect from Albania.

And whilst the winning song was in English, songs that were not in the English language did really well. Of the five songs that didn't qualify in semifinal one, they were all fully in English. Ha! So don't sing in English, sing in your own language. And I think it's great to see that Europe is so open to listening to songs in other languages.

Katy Lee:
Yeah, also people singing in each other's languages. Like I was quite happy to see, you know, the Dutch guy singing in French a little bit, for example.

Dominic Kraemer:
Yeah, and Finland singing a bit in German. My only plea to the organisers apart from putting it in the Vienna State Opera next year is to subtitle more songs just like Italy did this year. I mean, I want to know what people are singing about.

Katy Lee:
Oh, yeah, I wondered if we actually got to read that because it was Italy who chose to do it. I really appreciated being able to read the words, which were actually quite beautiful.

Dominic Kraemer:
Yeah, I agree. They should do it more often. Anyway, that's it. That was apparently a good week for Austria. Well done.

[MUSIC]

Katy Lee:
This podcast only exists a whole seven and a half years after we turned on our microphones for the first time, because our listeners make it happen every week. We wouldn't be here without the generous listeners who chip in a little bit of money each month so that we can pay for all of the research or the recording time, all of the editing that goes into making the show. So if you like listening to us witter on every week about Eurovision and other stuff, we would love it if you could send whatever you can afford our way. Even if it's just a couple of bucks a month, it really makes a huge difference when lots of listeners do that at the same time. And this week we do have lots of people to thank. Hooray!

Dominic Kraemer:
Yay, we do. Thank you to Kate, Stephanie, Peter, Alfie, Moritz, Ernest, Julie, Simon, Vala, Alessandro, Kuba, Johnny, and thank you to Jorge for increasing. If you're thinking, oh, maybe I should also give some money to this independent podcast—3ell, why not make this the week that you take the plunge? Head to patreon.com/europeanspodcast and you'll see that you can donate as little as three euros a month to help keep this show on the road. Thank you all so much.

[MUSIC]

Katy Lee:
So, there have been plenty of elections over the past week for us to get our teeth into. Poland, which we heard a little bit about at the top of the show, thank you Wojciech. Portugal, where the centre-right came top, but the far-right made big, big gains, which is a story that we have heard a few times recently. But this week we are going to Romania to catch up on the latest twist in one of the craziest political dramas we've seen anywhere in Europe in quite some time. Would you like a little recap?

Dominic Kraemer:
Yes, please.

Katy Lee:
So, last November, Romania held a presidential election. So far, so normal. Except, something completely nuts happened, where a far-right candidate, called Călin Georgescu, who just happens to be friendly with Russia, he went from having about 5% of the vote in opinion polls just a few days before the election, to winning the first round, out of nowhere. That led to a huge effort to figure out what the hell happened, and pretty quickly, a Romanian intelligence investigation pointed strongly to signs of a Russian information operation to get this guy, Georgescu, elected, with the help of paid TikTok influencers, among other things.

Romania's constitutional court then annulled that election and said it had to be rerun, because of the alleged Russian interference. Georgescu got banned from running in the rerun, but when the rerun of the first round did take place at the beginning of this month, lo and behold, it is another far-right candidate who comes way ahead of his rival. It's this former football hooligan guy called George Simion.

Simion gave a lot of mixed messages. He was mostly presented in media reports as being this kind of Viktor Orban-esque character, who wanted to make Romania great again, and was anti-EU, against aid to Ukraine. But at the same time, he said he wasn't going to rock the boat in Europe.

In any case, this weekend, the rest of the EU was fully braced for Romania to elect a far-right president, with a considerable degree of power over the course of the country. And then, another plot twist. The second-place guy, the moderate guy, he goes from being way behind the far-right candidate to winning the whole thing on Sunday.

Nicușor Dan, the mayor of Bucharest—this guy could not be more different than the far-right candidate he was up against. He's pro-Ukraine, he's pro-EU, he's an academic by training, a gifted mathematician, and he didn't just win. He won by a pretty comfortable majority. He got 54% of the vote compared to Simion's 46%.

Dominic Kraemer:
One of my favourite things about when the election results came out was that George Simion, the far-right candidate, once the exit polls were released, he initially decided to claim victory, even though the exit polls immediately suggested that he was going to lose significantly. And he posted on Twitter saying, I am now the president of (flag). And he meant to put the Romanian flag, but he put the flag of Chad.

Katy Lee:
To his credit, they are basically identical flags. If you're just scrolling through the little emoji list and you see it, anyone can make the same mistake. But it was very funny when they're all of these tweets, AI was picking up that it was like Chad's flag rather than Romania's and saying, no, this is false. He cannot really make any claim to be the president of Chad.

But I mean, yeah, Simion, he clearly wasn't expecting to lose, right? And the opinion polls weren't expecting him to lose either. What the hell just happened…in the words of the UK's Eurovision entry?

I am really excited about our guest this week. Codruța Simina is a veteran journalist in Romania and a long-term observer of Romanian politics. So an obvious person to call. But she's particularly interesting to talk to because in recent years, she has specialized as a journalist in covering online misinformation and disinformation.

How does the way that we experience the internet affect what happens in politics? Seems like a pretty relevant question in Romania right now. And she seemed like the perfect person to talk to this week. Dominic was sadly not free to join us, but I was delighted to give Codruța a call in Cluj-Napoca.

[SKYPE RINGING TONE]

Katy Lee:
Codruța, thank you so much for joining me today.

Codruța Simina:
Thank you for inviting me, yeah.

Katy Lee:
I'm really appreciative of you taking the time to speak to me after such a tiring week.I guess my first question is this. How much of a shock is this election result? I mean, George Simion, the far-right candidate, he got like twice the share of Nicușor Dan in the first round of the election, 40-ish percent compared to 21%. And now a few weeks later, Dan manages to turn it around completely and beat his far-right rival really quite decisively. How did he do it? And to what extent are you surprised by what just happened?

Codruța Simina:
Okay, so first of all, it was a tiring six months, not weeks. But to go back to the results of the elections, I think Nicușor Dan managed to win by being very present and saying things that people were really curious about. So how will he solve the economical problems? Because Romania is now in such a sensitive economical moment. How will he deal with inequalities, with the society, which is very polarized? And all the polls before showed that Romanians are in big percent supportive of the pro-European message. And Nicușor Dan was very clear and neat about that.

Katy Lee:
So how is it possible that before that, a far-right candidate was leading?

Codruța Simina:
Well, you would have to understand the informational space in Romania in order to understand how the far-right candidate was on such a rise. Because we've had years when all the major parties used to pay mainstream televisions and mainstream newspapers through advertising agencies, and they were spending this money on propaganda. But when you looked at the content that the televisions were putting on or the newspapers were writing about, you would not see the articles marked as publicity or propaganda. So actually, I think what happened in Romania for the past three to four years was that we consumed a lot of propaganda sold to us as news. So you would have a very controlled political discourse. The politicians were avoiding to address the issues that the people were feeling, like the growing inflation, the prices growing for groceries, for food, for the utilities like electrical power and stuff like that. And Romania was hit hard by inflation in the last year.

And we didn't have this kind of speech coming from the politicians who were in the ruling parties. And this gave a huge space for the populist candidate to gather people's emotions and to appear as a sort of unique alternative to what people started calling the system. This was the environment that he exploded.

And then we had Nicușor Dan, who came as an independent, but people knew him because he was already mayor of Bucharest for the last five years. He ran again and won last year. What he was able to do, he was able to show that he's more trustworthy than his opponent.

Katy Lee:
Yeah, I guess the thing I'm struggling to still understand is that like, you know, Dan was in the first round of this election. He was standing against Simion. They were both making these arguments in the first round. How is it possible that so much changed between round one and round two?

Codruța Simina:
You know, they never actually met each other in the first round. There was no debate between the two of them. And then the debate actually happened. And it was like three and a half to four hours long. It was a very long debate where you could see both of them answering the same questions, interacting with each other. And I think that was the major point where people changed their minds or decided they want to go vote. And that's the thing they haven't been doing for, I don't know, 10 or 20 years. But people felt it was a very important moment because they felt like we have to choose between a European path or a path that would lead back to corruption and the muddy years of the 1990s. And at that point, you would understand that one of them is speaking from public data and has information and has correct data gathered from facts, and the other was just trying to just say different tag words that his political team and his political audience is being activated by.

Katy Lee:
I want to ask you about what happened online, because, of course, the world became very interested in what happens in Romanian politics online last November. So, yeah, I want to ask about take one of this election, the one at the end of last year that got cancelled.

You write this excellent newsletter called Misreport, which is about online disinformation. A couple of days after the election in November, the one that ended up being cancelled, you apologized to your readers. Why did you feel that you owed them an apology?

Codruța Simina:
Because when we started Misreport in 2020, the mission that we wanted to do with Misreport was informing a community about what happens in online disinformation, teaching them about tactics, about how they are being manipulated by algorithms of the social networks. And I talked to my partner in Bucharest, who's an IT expert, and we felt we weren't able to do the mission we proposed ourselves because we didn't see the rise of Călin Georgescu, even though we wrote about him several times because we knew who he was and we knew what kind of mystical mumbo-jumbo he's projecting. But we never saw him coming on TikTok. We felt like the right thing to do is apologizing to our audience because we were not able to tell them what's happening in real time.

Katy Lee:
But is the fact that you didn't see what was happening with Georgescu, is that because your own experience of the internet, in terms of what your algorithms were serving you in terms of political content, was completely different from the kind of people that were being targeted? Is that what was happening?

Codruța Simina:
Yeah, I'm afraid that's what's been happening. TikTok algorithm is quite different than Facebook one or the Instagram one. And once that algorithm understands that you enjoy a sort of information, his tendency will be to feed you non-stop with that, you know?

And this is something that I think all of us should learn in a fast digital education kit. Because I think most of us, when we go online on social networks, we think that we're seeing what our friends are posting there or what the people that we're following are posting there. But actually what's happening is that we're being fed a plate with things that, yeah, we are interested in a small part of that content. But a huge chunk of that content that reaches us is actually reaching us because of the algorithm.

Katy Lee:
Was it not obvious at all from your own experience of the internet during that first campaign that something weird was happening?

Codruța Simina:
No, from my experience, no. I had my daughter who was on TikTok and at a certain point started showing me what she was seeing. Because at the beginning she was like, who's this guy? Okay, interesting. Let's see what he's saying. And then she started showing me and there were like, I don't know, hundreds of accounts posting sort of the same content. But it was Thursday before the first round, and I didn't perceive it as being able to change in such a way the results of the elections.

Katy Lee:
Because I guess you see it on your daughter's phone, but how do you know that this is happening millions of times over? You don't know that, right?

Codruța Simina:
Yeah, you don't know. Not on TikTok. There were certain kinds of ways you could see that on Facebook, but then Facebook bought that tool. It was called CrowdTangle and they slowly shut it down. So now we don't have that. And it's actually very hard to understand right now for researchers how the deploy of content is being made and tailored on social networks.

Katy Lee:
Because I wanted to ask you, when Romania finally held the rerun of the election this month, did the online version of this election and the way it was being fought, did it feel different from the cancelled one?

Codruța Simina:
Yes, it really felt different and I can tell you why. Even though we've noticed inauthentic behavior on the official accounts of some of the main candidates, none of them was able to gain such wide audiences like Călin Georgescu did. And TikTok said in a report that they erased like 27,000 accounts that were working directly to amplify Călin Georgescu. We haven't seen that magnitude this time. At this time, I think we've identified networks with maximum 100 bots.

Katy Lee: In terms of lessons that Europe should learn from Romania's experience of all of this, what lessons do you think the rest of Europe should be learning from all of this? Are there reforms that you'd like to see?

Codruța Simina:
From what I can see right now, I think one of the most important things is that politicians have the responsibility to communicate consistent, verified data regarding the government and public spending. And they need to be more transparent and more on point, because people need to understand what's happening. Because if people don't understand, they will look for the simple explanations. And that's what the populists do all around the world.

Another lesson that I've learned is that we need media literacy and digital education in school as soon as possible, starting from the kindergarten. I mean, people need to understand when they go online what they find there, because they go online and they inform themselves on social networks. And social networks are not newspapers and influencers are not journalists. People lie there. People mislead there. And they do that for money.

[MUSIC]

Katy Lee:
Thank you so much to Codruța for joining us. If you read Romanian, you should check out her excellent newsletter about disinformation in Romania and the rest of the world. It is called Misreport.

And by the way, fun fact, if you speak a Latin language, like French or Spanish or Italian, you probably can read a decent percentage of written Romanian, which has been one of my funnest discoveries while making The Europeans. You could also just make your life easy and read it with Google Translate. You'll find it at misreport.ro.

You mentioned a couple of weeks ago, Dominic, that you wanted us to talk a bit more on the podcast about how the structure of the internet is messing with our democracy. So I hope this conversation has whetted your appetite a bit.

Dominic Kraemer:
It certainly has. Thank you, Codruța. And thank you, Katy, for speaking to her.

Katy Lee:
You’re very welcome. It's also a topic that we're going to be coming back to over the next few weeks with another guest. So stay tuned for that. It feels a bit too important not to come back to. But for now, shall we do some recommendations?

[MUSIC]

Katy Lee:
Let’s head to the Inspiration Station. What have you been enjoying this week?

Dominic Kraemer:
I wanted to talk about a website in the Inspiration Station this week, a website that was brought to my attention by one of our lovely Patreon supporters, Anna, on our community chat. It's a website that calculates what your carbon footprint is by asking you a series of questions. It calculates the footprint and then it gives you recommendations that will help you reduce your carbon footprint.

Katy Lee:
Love that.

Dominic Kraemer:
My carbon footprint is apparently the equivalent of 5,159 kilograms of carbon dioxide. Significantly below average.

Katy Lee:
Oh, well done.

Dominic Kraemer:
I'm proud to say. Thank you.

Katy Lee:
You sound so smug.

Dominic Kraemer:
I am. But the website sets me a target to reduce my carbon footprint to 2,500 kilograms of carbon dioxide by 2030. And they don't just say that I should do it and get on with it. They actually give me a long list of specific recommendations for what I could do and what impact that would have on my overall footprint. For example, they say if I only eat potatoes and barley instead of rice, I could shave 17 kilograms of CO2 off my footprint. It's very specific.

Katy Lee:
Yeah, but rice, though. Sorry, as an Asian, that would be hard for me. I just can't do it. Sorry.

Dominic Kraemer:
I'm not sure I can do it either. Anyway, thanks, Anna, for the suggestion. The website is funded by the EU, but it's not totally bureaucratic looking. It actually looks quite nice. The website is called pslifestyle-app.net.

Katy Lee: I can't wait to do this. I love that it gives you so many practical pointers for things to actually do.

Dominic Kraemer:
What have you been enjoying, Katy?

Katy Lee:
I finished a book that I've been making my way through for months now, which is a novel, Apeirogon, by the Irish writer Colum McCann. Have you heard of it?

Dominic Kraemer:
No, I haven't.

Katy Lee:
I should start out by saying it's not an easy read. It is a novel about the Israel-Palestine conflict. And at its heart are the real-life stories of two men, Bassam Aramin and Rami Elhanan. They are respectively a Palestinian dad and an Israeli dad who both lost daughters to the conflict. Both Bassam and Rami joined this group called the Parent Circle, which brought together bereaved parents from both sides in the quest for peace. And they became, very improbably, really close friends through this shared traumatic experience. And they've both continued to lobby for peace ever since. You might have seen them actually in news reports over the last year and a half speaking out on the current conflict.

And it's a really astonishing novel. It was based on quite extensive interviews with both Bassam and Rami. But Colum McCann, this Irish writer, he got their permission to use imaginative license to fill the gaps. And I found the result incredibly powerful. It's a strange book. It's made up of these little tiny chapters that are just a few lines long that kind of flow into each other, which makes it feel a bit like you're reading a holy book, like the Torah or the Quran. And if you read reviews of this novel online, they're mostly extremely positive, but you'll also find some critical ones arguing that by looking at both sides of the conflict, McCann is avoiding making difficult moral judgments in some way. He's just saying, it's complicated. No one's right. No one's wrong.

I don't really agree with that interpretation. I do think this novel puts its emphasis on the everyday wrongs that are dealt on ordinary Palestinians, trying to just go about their business by the Israeli state, even in times that are not as brutal as what is happening right now. And McCann's decision to write this book was apparently informed by his own experience of growing up during conflict in Northern Ireland. And it is heartbreaking and infuriating and compassionate. It doesn't make me feel much more hopeful about a solution right now, if I'm being honest, but I do really recommend reading it.

The book is called Apeirogon, and in the show notes, you'll find details of the book, but also a discussion that Conor McCann, the writer, had with Bazham and Rami, the two real-life fathers, at the centre of his novel about a year ago. And then it's also well worth your time.

[MUSIC]

Dominic Kramer:
Time for a happy ending to round off the show. We live in a time when there are vanishingly few things to celebrate when it comes to the climate, but I'm going to allow myself a moment of positivity because I was truly cheered to read that in Poland last month, for the first time ever, under half of Poland's electricity was produced by coal. That might sound like a rather meagre achievement, and perhaps it is, but it's also progress. And the change is thanks to renewables, which are making up a bigger and bigger chunk of the electricity mix.

The news was announced by the energy think tank Forum Energy, and they say that Poland's dependence on coal has reduced by almost 30% over the last 10 years. This is a happy ending, but I have to point out that Donald Tusk's government, who have been in power since December 2023, have not been receiving plaudits for their efforts to accelerate the energy transition. The director of this think tank that made the report said to Notes from Poland back in January, ‘The energy transition is not a priority for this government. It shows.’

But this is meant to be a happy ending. So here's a bonus happy fact. Apparently, April 2025 also saw the second lowest monthly electricity demand in Poland.

Katy Lee:
Oh!

Dominic Kraemer:
There you go. That'll leave you all happy.

Katy Lee:
Should we bring Wojciech back to make things more miserable again?

Dominic Kraemer:
Absolutely.

Katy Lee:
Come back, Wojciech!

[MUSIC]

Dominic Kraemer:
That’s all we've got time for today, but thank you to our producers, Morgan Childs and Wojciech Oleksiak. We'll be back next week in your feeds on Thursday.

And until then, check us out on YouTube, on Instagram, on BlueSky, on Mastodon. We're in all those places.

Katy Lee:
All corners of the internet. Next week, we've got a particularly tasty, food-themed interview for you. Delicious. Can't wait. We'll see you then.

Dominic Kraemer:
Tschüss!

Katy Lee:
Bye!