Staycation

The ADR's summer interview series dropped this week, with party president Alexandra Schoos sitting down with RTL in her home municipality of Berdorf. She brought her border terrier Pinda, chose a viewpoint over the sandstone crags, and talked about holidays, politics, and what she'd do if the ADR didn't exist.

Schoos has been abroad once this summer, to the Mecklenburgische Seenplatte in northern Germany. Next up: the Dutch coast with the dog, then a friend in Leipzig, then a fasting retreat in Austria. She says she reads on fasting trips. The last book she finished was a mental health guide, last August. Since then, she's been picking up books without finishing them, listening to audiobooks in the car instead.

On the wildfires across Europe, she wants Luxembourg to consider firefighting aircraft. She also wants more promotion of volunteer fire brigades, particularly in rural areas where professional firefighters aren't always available. It's a practical answer, if slightly optimistic about Luxembourg's budget for water-dropping planes.

On the proposed social media ban for children and teens, the ADR is against it. Not because they don't want to protect young people, Schoos says, but because they don't think everything should be regulated or banned. Young people need to learn to deal with these things critically, she argues, and banning just delays that learning. The alternative: discuss it in schools and at home.

It's a position that sounds reasonable in theory and gets complicated in practice. The same argument could be made for driving, alcohol, or gambling, and we regulate all of those. But there's a genuine tension between protection and autonomy that's worth taking seriously, even if the ADR's free-market instincts lean pretty clearly toward one side.

On the index cap, Schoos describes a vicious circle: cost of living rises, the index adapts, minimum wage hikes follow, employers feel the squeeze, and costs rise again. The ADR is against capping the index. Whether that's principled or just convenient for an opposition party depends on your perspective.

Asked what she'd most like to learn, she said a language. English isn't enough, she discovered in Catalunya, where young people struggled with it. She started Swedish once. She's considered Mandarin, something with a different alphabet and lots of dialects, a real challenge for the brain.

And if the ADR didn't exist? She'd start a new party. With Gast Gibéryen.

It's a summer interview. Light on policy, heavy on personality. You learn that the ADR president likes fasting retreats, border terriers, and the idea of learning Mandarin. You also learn that she's against banning social media for kids, against capping the index, and for firefighting planes. Whether any of that moves the needle politically is a different question. But it's August, and the news is slow, and the ADR president has a dog named Pinda.