Within the German government, Annalena Baerbock is the first to have reacted Monday, October 10 to the massive strikes of the Russians in Ukraine qualifying them as “despicable”, assuring that Germany was doing everything to strengthen the air defenses of Ukraine. The young Foreign Minister is one of the two “Grünen” within the Scholz coalition where she sits alongside the Social Democrats and the Liberals.
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At 41, she is one of those Grünen “réalos” who have long shaken up ecological dogmas, on the increase in the army budget or even support for coal-fired power stations. Here in France, it may come as a surprise, but it was this generation of pragmatic ecologists who experienced the Joshka Fischer turn in 1997, who remains THE green foreign minister who had sent Germany to go to war again. It was in Kosovo.
Very anti-nuclear, his parents take him to the demonstrations quite early. On the farm where she grew up near Hanover, a large Greenpeace poster sits in her bedroom. Annalena Baerbock joined the Grünen at the age of 25, in 2005. Then everything went extremely fast. Four years later, she became party chairman in Brandenburg, the region surrounding Berlin. In 2013, at the age of 33, she entered the Bundestag and in 2018, she joined Robert Habeck to co-lead the party. All the media are already imagining that the latter will be chancellor. But Annalena Baerbock clearly shows the color: no question of doing figuration. “I will not be the woman alongside Robert Habeck”, she warns. She will end up convincing her party to send for the first time a competitor in the race for the chancellery. She.
Ambitious, competitive. These adjectives describe Annalena Baerbock. As a child, she competed a lot on the trampoline. She also picked up trtwice the bronze medal at the German Championships. So ambitious that she comes to embellish – awkwardly to say the least – her CV. Alas for her, at the time of the last legislative elections in September 2021, the press discovered that she was claiming a license at the University of Hamburg when she only had the pre-diploma. Even if it’s enough to enter the London School of Economics, where she earns a master’s degree for good.
Annalena Baerbock also prides herself on being an active member of a dozen organizations such as the High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Bad luck, there is no UNHCR member. She also claims to have managed the Brussels office of a MEP from 2005 to 2008. In reality, she was in charge of IT and only took on responsibilities at the end of this period. Last June, she was accused of having plagiarized certain passages from her book Jetzt (Now).
About the famous Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, Annalena Baerbock is practically the only one, as of 2018, to shout loud and clear that Germany already has a 40% dependence on Russia. The environmentalist warns: if the country opens additional gas pipelines without diversifying their energy sources, it risks aggravating this dependence.
On June 26, 2021, during a debate during the campaign for the last legislative elections, she predicted that this pipeline – Nord Stream 2 – will lead to the Ukrainian conflict. The Podkast presented by journalist Hélène Kall broadcast an extract in its series devoted to the German Greens. “Putin’s goal is to use this gas to cut off the connection with Ukraine. Our neighbors in Eastern Europe have big, big concerns. We must not be naive in thinking that the Russians will play by the rules. Mr. Putin will not. Mr. Putin is not only in conflict with Ukraine, he is also with us Europeans.” declares the ecologist facing his two adversaries, Olaf Scholz for the SPD (the psocial democrat art from germany) and Armin Laschet for the CDU (lChristian Democratic Union). They raiset eyes to the sky.
Annalena Baerbock goes a bit crazy, the Cassandra who also predicts consequences on the climate. But afterwards, theThe facts will prove him right. When drafting the coalition contract last winter – a few months before the start of the war in Ukraine – Annalena Baerbock obtained not to commit to opening this gas pipeline “as long as we have no guarantees on the troops massed at the border”. The German government will eventually hear it.
Annalena Baerbock received Wednesday, October 12 in Berlin, the prize for political personality of the year. The German Foreign Minister has asked her former French counterpart, Jean-Yves Le Drian, to come and give her this award. Even the daily Bildzeitung, which had criticized her a lot, explained this summer that she would be better chancellor than Olaf Scholz. Something to make the Greens dream here in France.