Upon serving as Latvia’s Finance and Transport Minister in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Mr. Zīle is now one of the ECR Group’s most competent and active voices on economic and monetary matters. He is currently hard at work on a number of negotiations with the EU Council and the Commission on everything from the Union’s Covid-19 relief fund (better known by its acronym RRF or Recovery and Resilience Fund), the so-called Connecting Europe Facility and the EU’s seven-year budget for 2021-2027 (also known as the Multiannual Financial Framework or MFF). In this conversation with Jorge González-Gallarza, Mr. Zīle unpacks what his work in each of these negotiations has been about, as well as a number of other initiatives such as the Rail Baltica Project, and issues such as the Baltic states’ geo-strategic and energy security.
