Future of EU and Austria with MEP Anna Stürgkh
When people think things cannot go the same way as before and they are disengaged from traditional political parties, being […]
When people think things cannot go the same way as before and they are disengaged from traditional political parties, being […]
When people think things cannot go the same way as before and they are disengaged from traditional political parties, being honest with voters and telling the uncomfortable truth can pay off in politics. This might be the secret behind NEOS’ success in recent elections in Austria.
Liberal Europe Podcast host Ricardo Silvestre talks to Austrian Renew Europe MEP Anna Stürgkh who shares her journey from Austria to the European Parliament, her passion for the European Union, and her work on energy security and reform. We also dive into pressing issues like the future of Europe, the rise of populism, and the importance of delivering on Europe’s promises to its citizens.
Show notes
This podcast is produced by the European Liberal Forum in collaboration with Movimento Liberal Social and Fundacja Liberté!, with the financial support of the European Parliament. Neither the European Parliament nor the European Liberal Forum are responsible for the content or for any use that be made of.
The article that Ricardo mentions in the conversation can be found here (pp33).
Welcome to the Liberal Europe Podcast. Podcast from the European Liberal Forum. I’m your host, Ricard Silverste, and it’s a privilege to be joined by the MEP Anna Stürgkh. Anna, thank you so much for coming to the podcast.
My privilege to be here.
All right, Anna, tell us a little about yourself. What was the path that you took to the point that we’re now talking here at the European Parliament? It’s such a tremendous place for us to have this conversation. So, what was the path that you took to the point that we’re now talking?
I know, it’s still surreal for me to be sitting in these kind of environments, but. Yeah, my name is Anna. I’m 30 years old, so I was about two months old when Austria voted on joining the EU. So my whole life being part of the European Union was just a given, and I tried to enjoy the privileges that come with it. And, you know, I went into reigning after school, and I went and lived in Paris for a few months after school, you know, working as an au pair there and working at a restaurant. And then I decided to study in England and absolutely loved it. Best three years of my life. Made the most amazing friends that became family, really made a home there. And I studied there from 2013 to 2016. So, it was the day of our graduation was the day that the results of the Brexit referendum were announced. And that just changed my entire life, because I never thought that were possible. And really, for me, it felt personal. And it was at that moment that I decided I wanted to support the European project, and I wanted to do something with my life that supported Europe. And then, things went from one thing to the other, and here I am.
So your studies, I’m interested. What were the studies that you were doing, particularly when you were in London? Because I imagine that will be a connection or wasn’t it was like completely separate tracks in your life?
I guess, kind of related. I was always interested in politics and big political ideas, so I studied history with a focus on history of political thought. The idea of how people decide to live together, how you set up a set of rules, has always really fascinated me. And actually, I worked a lot on the history of international law, both on a legal, but particularly from a political point of view. And I guess in a way, now, in hindsight, you know, this connects a lot with how we set up the European Union and what we want from Europe and what our vision is going forward, how we work together as different nations.
And one thing that’s amazing is that eclectic past that you have. You told us that you’ve been, naturally, you’re from Austria, but you’ve been in France, you’ve been in England. Let’s stay there for two more seconds. Because myself also, I was deeply saddened by what we saw with Brexit. On that one, in particular, how do you see the European Union project then? We, I’m sure you and I, we’re optimists and we are doing our best to keep this project going. But you being on inside particular of the European Parliament, how do you see the future of the European Union project?
Well, I think what’s interesting is that we see a very diverging path in the sense that on the one hand there’s a lot of people, particularly in younger generations, that see a European future, that want more Europe, that want us to work together more closely. And we see this also in very pro European parties like my own, actually, having great successes in the European elections. On the one hand there’s a rise in a very pro European movement, while at the same time, if we look at this new house, if we look at this new Parliament, then there is a very big chunk of MEPs that don’t support the European project. When we had our first plenary session in Strasbourg, there were MEPs that didn’t stand up for the European anthem. And that says a lot. And I think that shows us that at the moment, we’re at crossroad and I think as pro Europeans, we have a very big task ahead of us. And that in my opinion, is making the European project deliver. Because at the end of the day, that is what feeds Euroscepticism, is that people don’t feel the effect, the positive effect that Europe has, and it does have that. But we have to make sure that the people in their day-to-day life actually feel that positive impact because otherwise they’re going to listen to some of the lies, but also of the propaganda and very populist narrative that is being spun by particularly the far right.
Very good. We’re going to touch on that. You just mentioned about NEOS, which is the party you were elected for. But before that, let’s talk about delivering. You’ve been doing work regarding energy security especially, and this is something that also interests me a lot, the Common Energy Union. Please get into that. How is this important exactly to deliver to our co Europeans?
Well, I think energy is such a great topic and I’m so privileged to be working on this here in the European Parliament because it’s a threefold issue. On the one hand, when we talk about energy, we talk about green transition, we talk about the environment, when we talk about energy, we also talk about geopolitics. Especially now at this point of our lives. We should see from the Russian aggression and everything that followed from it, that being reliant on Russian gas, being reliant on gas from other autocrats as well, is not secure. It’s not a safe route to go. So this is energy politics has a lot to do with geopolitics, it’s got a lot to do with our security. But it’s also an economic question. And this is where I’ll get to how do people feel it in their day to day life? A lot of the inflation that we see depending on each country, but a lot of the inflation that we’ve seen over the last few years was due to rising energy prices. And people feel this financial weight. They don’t know how to be able to pay the energy bills at the end of the month when you go into the supermarket, every single piece, almost every single item has become more expensive, partly due to rising energy prices. So, solving our energy crisis, solving this question of why are we still not one clear energy union is going to be key to not only having a greener future, not only finally not being reliant on Putin and other autocrats, but particularly making everyday life of every citizen cheaper.
I wanted to stay there, which is the question of security. And I saw the Dan Jørgensen on his round of questions, particularly regarding the phasing out from Russian energy and I noticed that he was had a little bit of lack of details. We have repower EU and that is very positive. We have this concept, actually European Liberal Forum we published about this and I’ll put the link on the podcast show notes about what we call energy solidarity and how energy should flow in every direction and not just have this state by state. How can you do this? Be clearer to our Europeans and to our leaders to understand that again we have the energy that we need. We just have to make this thing flow from one side to the other.
I think in a way it’s not necessarily about making it clear because I think it has became very clear more and more so. And you can tell that again, at least in this house, the question of the energy union, it’s not so much anymore a question of do we need it, it’s more a question of how do we get there and how fast. There’s definitely a push towards a real energy union and there’s also, I think an identification of the fact that nations that for example have the opportunity of having offshore wind would actually profit from having a real European grid, because then they can sell their energy all over Europe. So, I think there has definitely been a realisation of the importance of that. But then when we ask the question of how do we get there, we get to the problems that being sometimes still unfortunately, not enough political will. You mentioned Danielson’s hearing when we talked about Russian gas. He was talking about how great a path we were on as a European Union because we’ve lowered the percentage of Russian gas we’re importing.
And, you know, he talked about 14-15%, it depends on what month we look at. And I could only laugh to myself because in Austria it’s over 80%, depending on the month again, but it’s around 87% of Russian gas. So we are far from even taking one step away from Russian gas, from getting into a real European energy market. We’re still flirting with Putin when it comes to our energy. And I think that is political will. That’s all it is. But then the big question is financing. How can we finance this? Because it’s so much money that is needed. Because we don’t just need new transmitters, we don’t just need to amp up our game when it comes to building wind farms, et cetera. We don’t even have to look transnational. If we look at distribution grids, for example, which are equally important when it comes to energy transition on a European level, it doesn’t matter that they’re within one nation state, they’re important on the European level. And if we only look at that, we’re going to need up to 500 billion euros just to regenerate the ones that are already there, to renew them, to build new ones. So this is the big question we’re going to have to answer in the next few months. How can we afford this?
We’re very fortunate to have you leading the words on that bill, if you allow me to, just for a second, my job here as the host and the moderator, because it’s not only a question of Russia, which is, as you mentioned, you explained it beautifully. So. But, for example, Iberia is an energy island and it’s something that has been mentioned by the European Commission and the European Parliament for some time, and for us to be able to connect with the centre of Europe, it’s so complicated to make that. That happen. So something for us to digest as we move along. Let’s talk about Austria, which is a beautiful country. I know Austria and I love it. It’s a very, very, very charming country. And we just had an election, actually two with European Union election, which gave you to us only. That is just amazing. But now we had very good results from NEOS. Tell us a little bit, what did the feeling in Austria, particularly with FPO getting the majority of votes?
Yeah. So as you said, we had two major elections, the European elections and now the national elections. In both of these we saw a rise of the far-right votes, which is the FPO. But this national election in particular saw them, they won the election. And I think the sentiment really depends on who you talk to, because I guess if you talk to someone who voted for them, they will give you a very different answer from me now. But I think what we saw in this election is that people want change. They have had it with everything always going on in the same way. And voters are saying enough, we want change, and we want reform. And this is something that NEOS embodies. We had the best result we’ve ever had in national elections. And we ran on saying we need reforms on so many levels. And we were telling very uncomfortable truths, such as the fact that we will need to rein in the spending of money because we are running a very high deficit at the moment. So despite the fact that we were telling these truths, people gave us their vote because they see that it just can’t go on like this. And we need to change things. We need real reform, and we need to make sure that we bring Austria into a brighter future and where politics is being done in a different way.
Absolutely. But let’s talk about real politics now, which is then you have FPO that won the election. NEOS had a tremendous result. And I imagine that NEOS will not be in any kind of coalitions with the extreme right wing. And I would like to see more of that happen more often in Europe. But tell us about the future of Austria. So NEOS will continue to do his work, but do you think that there could be like a little bit of a shift to liberalism like we see in Hungary or in Slovakia.
Well, again, I think it kind of depends on what the next government does. I mean, we are literally, as we are speaking right now, the coalition talks are being prepared. There will be coalition talks that NEOS is going to be part of. So this is very exciting times for us as a party. We don’t know where we’ll stand in a few months, so maybe we’ll cheque back in and see what happened. But this is for us, really interesting times because of course we want to be able to support this new path for Austria and we want to be able to be part of that reform and renewal, but only if it’s done right. And that’s important to us. You know, we don’t want to govern for the sake of governing.
And this brings me back to your question. I think the next government, just like the European Union has to deliver and perform and make sure that people feel that their worries and their fears are being taken seriously. Because at the end of the day, if we look at the voters of the far right, not everyone who voted for the FPO agrees with everything they’re saying. They don’t agree with their racism, they don’t necessarily agree with their far-right thoughts and their nationalistic approach, but they feel heard and they feel like they are offering easy answers. No matter whether we’ll be in a government or in the opposition, we as NEOS, we will have to show people that we have solutions. They might not sound as easy, but they’re better and more effective and they actually bring a better life for people.
As a great communicator, as you are, then tell our listeners and our viewers then, what is the secret that NEOS? Did you tap into something? Because I actually follow NEOS from the beginning and it’s tremendous to see NEOS growing and having the results. But to other people that are listening to us and they’re thinking we need to do the same thing, which is to convey those messages of hope and messages of political will to reform and to make was something different.
I think we just always stayed true to what we believe in and who we are and we never tried to sell something that we aren’t and that we weren’t. And you know, it’s, in a way it feels a little bit like steady wins the race because there are other liberal parties in Europe that have had tremendous results just starting out. You know, they went from basically 0 to 20% of the votes. You know, we’ve been around for 10 years now. This is our fourth national election and we’re up to not, not even 10%. So if you compare that to other parties, it might not seem like much, but we’re here to stick around. And what we’ve managed to do this time around, and I think this is something that gives us hope at least. We got 9 point something percent of the voter share, but over 60% of the people in Austria want us to govern. And I think that shows that we’re on the right path and we have to continue to stay true to who we are, to our liberal values and to deliver on those. And then we’ll see what happens.
Perfect. How adversarial do you think we should be with the populists? Or should we not engage with them and engage with the voter? Or should we point out when they lie and they confabulate?
I don’t know. I mean, I feel like we’ve done that for the last few years, and I don’t feel like it really got us to a place where they were weakened. I think you touched on the right point. I think we have to engage with the voters and not care so much about what the party is saying. But look at, how can we talk to the voters directly? Because again, like I said, I think dialogue is going to help us move forward. And at the end of the day, I think that’s our job as politicians, to talk to people and to listen to them and to, yeah, I guess, find solutions together.
Well, you did something right because you’re here at European Parliament. Tell us a little bit about the future. What does the future bring to you?
To me personally?
Do I see you as the Chancellor of Austria in how long? 10 years? 15 years? You’ll be the Chancellor, President of the European Commission?
Honestly, I’m just so happy and I honestly feel so privileged to be where I am right now. And I just want to focus on doing what I’m doing now and delivering on what I promised during the campaign. But also, as I’m doing my work now and then we’ll see wherever that leads us.
Well, for old geezers, like me, to see Anna leading the way, it gives us hope. Tell our listeners and our viewers where they can follow you online.
Well, ideally follow me on Instagram. My handle is very easy. Anna Gkh. It’s a little joke with my last name. And yeah, you will definitely get information about what is happening in the European Parliament and I would love to see you there.
I’m going to put all the links on the podcast and the videocast show notes. I’ve been talking with Anna Stru Ana. This was amazing. We met in Estoril during the all the party congress. At the time, I already felt this need to have you here on the show and to talk with us because I think we’re in good hands with you here in European Parliament. Thank you so much.
Thank you for having me. It was a pleasure.