A quarter of the population in Austria and almost half of the inhabitants of Vienna (42.9 percent) have a migration background. The Green Party has always tried to win the favor of this section of the population. One could therefore believe that the climate council newly set up by climate minister Leonore Gewessler (Greens) is particularly “diverse”.
But far from it: If you look at the official press material of the Climate Council, the 84 of the originally 100 participants planned are teeming with “Grubers” and “Hubers”. Do the migrants give a damn about the Gewessler committee, whose participants were randomly selected by Statistics Austria and asked to work voluntarily?
“No,” says the Ministry of the Environment when asked about “eXXpress”. “The Climate Council reflects the Austrian population in terms of place of residence, age, gender, education, origin and income,” the Gewessler Ministry tells us. It was extremely successful in creating a demographic image of the Austrian population in the climate council. Eleven of the original 100 climate councils are people with a migration background.
“Original” – a word that should make journalists suspicious, especially when communicated by politicians. Because we know: there are not 100, but only 84 citizens who finally decided to participate in the climate council. We ask the Ministry of Climate Protection again how many of the actual participants have a migration background. According to Gewessler’s team, we cannot be told exactly because the data came from Statistics Austria.
We look at the list of participants and find out: the first and last names of the citizens interested in climate all sound “typically Austrian”, with a few exceptions. On closer inspection, there is no trace of the eleven participants with a migration background.
