EU play puts ‘diabolical’ food industry lobbyists center stage

Corporate lobbying is literally poisoning the EU, says a loud drama just running two weeks in Brussels.

europe connection Alexandra Bade, a francophone Romanian playwright, portrays the food and agriculture industry as a supreme force of evil whose greedy henchmen in Brussels will stop at nothing to bend EU law to their advantage.

But it shouldn’t just be about the food – the drama portrays Brussels as a pit of power-crazed lobbyists and consultants who spend millions to influence EU lawmakers to the detriment of the common European and the planet. affects.

Dark and angry, the piece tells the story of an MEP’s ruthless assistant who becomes a lobbyist for the pesticide industry, all for pay and status. Soon he is in too deep, hallucinating about the swarms of bees that he has killed and the people on his way to the top that he has destroyed. It all culminates in a full blown mental health tail-cum-moral crisis that he cannot resolve.

The narrative of cynical corporate lobbying, which will be familiar to many Brussels fans – it is one that is often pushed by left-leaning NGOs and green groups, who see any kind of advocacy by industries as natural losers from reforms. may stand as patently inappropriate. Yet the existence of the European Green Deal is proof that corporates do not always have the upper hand – unless it is completely swayed by the forces of change wielded by their lobbying.

The play, which runs downtown until November 26 Martyrs’ TheaterStrongest when it analyzes the allegedly nefarious tactics allegedly employed by lobbyists: swindling contacts during lunch, mastering the euphemistic vocabulary of bubbles, creating fake charitable NGOs – known as astro-turfing – or destroying the credibility of a distinguished professor.

It portrays the lobbyist – played by two actors, a man called Pierangel Buondelmonte and a woman called Aline Mahaux – as masters of these dark arts. In absurd interludes the actors hit the spot to suggest how robotic and inhumane lobbying is, and swap business cards with their mouths American Psycho,

finely drawn

europe connection certainly also timely and futuristic – even though it was written in 2015, Lobbying is a perennial issue in Brussels, but it’s in the spotlight right now as the food and agriculture industries push back Against the EU’s environmental policy agenda. Big Food’s argument, that Europe cannot underwrite the Green Revolution in wartime, echoes the food-security mantra that runs through the play.

But, even if you believe that a shadowy gang of lobbyists is operating in Brussels as the work of a theater, it is a dud. There’s a ton of tone, and no real characters barring a finely drawn lobbyist. The play’s overblown plot ultimately undermines both its dramatic plausibility and political power: a student takes his own life after being singled out for plagiarism by a lobbyist, whose wife slits her wrists when she tries to quit to save her sanity. Threatens.

In fact, rather than a corporate empire, the main villain of the piece is a one-dimensional wife who bullies her husband into staying at his hated job in order to “proud” him. This regressive portrayal of the hen-pecked, materialistic wife Jarr at odds with the progressive intent of the rest of the play.

The story also falls apart when it comes into contact with the reality of the European Union. Suggesting that the European Parliament is the most important institution of the EU, where minor acts of corporate pressure are a matter of life and death for Europe, is stretching it, to say the least. In contrast, compared to member states assembled in other powerful parts of the European Union system, such as the Council of the European Union, Parliament is a more ambitious force when it comes to banning toxic substances or seeking wider environmental and climate reform. becomes an institution.

Most disappointingly, this whiff of Manichean activism doesn’t bother to engage with the other side’s arguments or explore the reasons why so many intelligent human beings – who certainly could be doing other things – pursue careers in lobbying. Don’t some of them consume the Kool-Aid and not really believe they are providing an important service? The argument for the play would have been even stronger by debunking the lobbyist’s scaremongering food security narrative.

As an advocate of its own cause, the play left me cold. Maybe, instead of going to the theatre, I needed to be taken out for an expensive lunch…

Clothilde Gouzard and Sarah-Taisir Bencharif contributed reviews.