Field of expertise: Health and economics

Olivier Chastel is a pharmacist and politician of Mouvement Réformateur) who has been serving as a Member of the European Parliament since 2019.

After finishing his studies at the Athénée Royal in Charleroi in 1982, Chastel graduated in Pharmacy at the Université Libre de Bruxelles in 1987. For some years, he subsequently worked as a research assistant at the Analytical Chemistry Department at the Pharmacy Institute (ULB). He was a scientific collaborator of the Analysis Laboratory Quality Assistance in Thuin, where he once was head of department and became a specialist in Quality Assurance.

Chastel headed the liberal list for the Chamber of Representatives in the Charleroi – Thuin district in the 1999 Belgian federal election, obtaining 12,000 votes and starting his federal career which would last until his election to the European Parliament in 2019.

He covered the role of Federal Minister for Budget and Administrative Simplification from 2011 to 2014. In that year, he was elected as President of the Mouvement Réformateur, a role which he held until 2019.

In the European Parliament, Chastel has been one of the vice-chairs of the Parliament’s Committee on Budgets. In this capacity, he served as his parliamentary group’s lead negotiator on the budget of the European Union for 2022 and on a controversial 2023 proposal to rent 15,000 square meters of office space for the European Parliament in Strasbourg from the French government. He is also a member of the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs.