TV chef takes stock
Sarah Wiener “sometimes” despaired in the EU Parliament
March 30, 2024, 9:38 p.m
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Television chef Sarah Wiener sits in the EU Parliament for the Austrian Greens for one legislative period. She remembers the time with mixed feelings, she says in an interview. She was particularly irritated by the behavior of some MPs.
The television chef and politician Sarah Wiener looks back critically on her time as a member of the EU Parliament. “It took at least two years to get through the parliamentary process,” she told “Spiegel”. “Sometimes I feel desperate because I still don’t understand how things work.” Wiener entered the EU Parliament for the Austrian Greens in 2019, but she will not run again in the June election.
She certainly also had a “naive idea of politics”. “I thought I would meet a lot of committed specialist politicians who were fighting for their cause with passion and intellect,” said the cook. When she spoke about principles and morals in parliament, some politicians looked at her “as if I had eaten too many mushrooms.”
Wiener also had difficulty with her role as a politician. The media interest as a chef could not be transferred to her politics: “There was never so little interest in me at the time when I had the most to say,” said Wiener. Overall, she describes her time in the EU Parliament as an “important time in her life” in which she learned an enormous amount.
She described her greatest political success as her greatest defeat. As a negotiator in the Environment Committee, she was able to organize a stable majority for a law to reduce pesticides. “That was considered very unlikely because from the first minute there was enormous headwind from lobbyists and a front of right-wing to right-wing radical politicians,” said Wiener.
But: The bill did not make it through parliament. In the plenary session, the plan was riddled with amendments and watered down so much that “I recommended that my group not agree to my amputated text. That was bitter.” She even tried to negotiate with right-wing extremists. Without luck. Ultimately, the Commission withdrew the proposal for pesticide reduction. “From my point of view, it was the strategically right way to withdraw the proposal if you wanted to implement the content strongly,” said Wiener.