Anne Will: She does that now on Sundays

It has been over a year since Anne Will (59) said goodbye to her political talk on Sunday evening in the first. And she still enjoys the free time that she now has on that day, as she now reveals.

“Sometimes I’m in the cinema, sometimes I’m at home, but always free. So I also have the feeling that I find it really nice every Sunday that I don’t have to work. I really think that,” she said in the “NDR Talk Show” on April 4. She also emphasized: “At 2.30 p.m. I was usually picked up and went towards the studio and now I always think: Yeah, 2:30 p.m. great, you can still do a lot of things!”

The journalist did not lie on the lazy skin after the end of her show in December 2023. A new episode of her podcast “Politics with Anne Will” appears every Thursday. That is “so much easier than television,” she says. “And by the way, so much easier than such a Sunday evening talk show, where you always know, of course, maybe four and a half million, five million viewers now see that.”

That is nice for your own ego, “if you take place there and attract a lot of attention”. But it also puts you under pressure at the same time. “I also felt it strongly, and I also said at any point that I don’t want that anymore.” She does not want to expose herself to this pressure again and again, but still continues to lead political interviews. Because she believes that she can “do it well”.

In her podcast, in which she now has one or even an hour and a half with only one guest, she can even have more intensive discussions than on Sunday evening. “It is clear how much time you have to pursue a thought, to deepen it, to ask again. And that makes me a lot of fun.”

She also had a guest of the former Chancellor Angela Merkel (70). That was a different feeling than in the television studio. “There is nothing in the room, there are only both of us. And when she was there, she was, noticeable, nervous for me. And of course this is a woman who is so practiced in interviews, of course nothing shocks. But: I think this strange, and also a bit alleged intimacy, where you are strange with someone who is strange, in such a small room.” This does something even with experienced politicians like Merkel.

Anne Will presented her political talk show from September 2007 to December 2023. Previously, she moderated the “daily topics” from 2001 to 2007. Caren Miosga (55) is the successor to her transmitter on Sunday evening.