As our podcast comes to an end, the year and the German presidency of the European Council do too. One of the foremost projects of the German presidency has been to link EU funding and compliance with rule of law standards. The mechanism is going to be a part of the next long-term budget of the Union, starting from 2021 – that is, if Hungary and Poland vote in favor of it, which is increasingly unclear at the moment. The connection of rule of law violations and EU money, the advantages and shortcomings of financial sanctions for member states as well as how things stand on the current proposal – that’s what we will discuss in this week’s episode of We Need to Talk About the Rule of Law that we will wrap up with an outlook on the current state of the Union, rule of law wise.Our fantastic guests for our final episode are:SERGEY LAGODINSKY, a Member of the European Parliament and Vice-Chair of the Parliament’s Committee on Legal Affairs.And KIM LANE SCHEPPELE, the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs in the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs and the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University.This has been We Need to Talk About the Rule of Law, the podcast addressing the Rule of Law crisis in the European Union, brought to you by Verfassungsblog and the German Bar Association (Deutscher Anwaltverein). We Need to Talk About the Rule of Law has been hosted by Maximilian Steinbeis and Lennart Kokott. Thanks to Dorothee Wildt, Niklas Müller and Eva Schriever of the German Bar Association and to Isabella Falkner and Jochen Schlenk of Verfassungsblog.