he's the john monee professor and european studies at stanford university, berlin. he joins us now via skype from there. all right, thanks for joining us. again, i want to start with or ban his party is one what? 3 consecutive parliamentary landslides in the past 12 years. but it seems there are reports that many of the supporters out on the streets today, i've actually been bust in from neighboring countries. how much support does he actually have right now at home? well, this is hard to say in a country in which one has more than a decade to control media, to streamline public opinion, to bombard people with propaganda slogans that the european union is bad. and everything is orchestrated by charge sorrows and it's and to submit and it's big and hungry is threatened and they need a strong leader. so if you hear this over and over and over again, it's pretty difficult to say how much of this resonates in a country that is more conservative than liberal societies in the west of broken union. so well then, let's talk about his opposition, contended pizza marcus. i 49

and john monee, profess and european studies at stanford university of berlin. he says the chances resignation shows that a system of checks and balances is working well in austria. well the good thing is that this is not an authoritarian. ready regime apparently it's a western type democratic system in which as we can see now of the system of checks and balances, work pretty well. otherwise this regime cut quotes the oaks to make you have one person show and martin people's party. that's their roof. all p of used to be before he came the chancellor. this is still the good news that everything works according to the constitution. and there's a system off long separation of powers still kind of works that good traditional system does its job. and most importantly for free media can do what we expect the previous year to do in a situation like this. lebanon's to biggest power plants have shut down off to running out of fuel. plunging most of the country into darkness, people and now relying on generators. prior to the outage, many in lebanon were receiving just 2