Baerbock at Brigitte Live
“It’s not our place to give wise advice now”
By Frauke Niemeyer
October 13, 2023, 8:01 a.m
Brigitte Live with Annalena Baerbock – it’s about Israel – of course, but also about when all foreign ministers have to take a clear stance together, and what Baerbock’s daughter discovers on construction sites.
Annalena Baerbock has to press stop on some videos. She could not bear what individual sequences of the massacre in Israel on Saturday showed, the Foreign Minister said on Thursday evening in the Brigitte Live Talk in Berlin. “If you put yourself in the situation: your own daughter or son says in the evening, ‘Bye, I’m going to the festival now,’ and the next morning you see these pictures, hear the news, and don’t know where your own child is .”
Solidarity is required. From Germany anyway, but not only: “Now everyone is in demand. Israel’s closest friends, we Europeans, we Germans, the Americans, but of course also our direct neighbors, such as Egypt,” said Baerbock. And being asked can also be understood concretely: While the minister is sitting on the Brigitte stage in a stylish Berlin cinema, it is already known that she will fly to Israel this Friday.
Oh God, what can you say at this moment?
The Green politician didn’t want to say exactly when, but the night certainly wasn’t too long. “Being able to survive on little sleep should be a key qualification for those involved in international politics,” the minister said later, and that the biggest challenges in the job don’t necessarily have to be meetings like those with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov also difficult because she had only been in office for a short time at the time), but perhaps more of a conversation with children who were freed from IS captivity. “You’re just as at a loss for words when you think, ‘Oh God, what can you say at this moment to a girl who has spent six years of her life in torture?'”
Baerbock will probably face similar challenges this Friday when, among other things, she wants to meet relatives who are currently having to endure ignorance about the fate of their loved ones in the hands of Hamas. Anyone who knows the minister’s demands on her own work, and on perfectionism even beyond the cameras, can imagine how Baerbock prepares the appropriate approach for these sensitive conversations on the government plane.
The Green Party held back from making statements on ambiguous questions during the talk on stage. With regard to the expected ground offensive in the Gaza Strip and fears that international law could be broken, the Foreign Minister only said: “It is not our place to give wise advice now.” We are “in discussions with partners and friends” about continuing humanitarian aid for the Palestinians.
In times like these, it is difficult to get away from the hard and pressing issues when talking to a foreign minister. Feminist foreign policy is, after all, a topic that you can obviously have fun with as a minister. Baerbock raves about the media interest in presenting her principles, including those who initially asked, “What the hell is that?” The term alone was enormously triggering, “everyone had an opinion about it.”
“Then we won’t take part anymore”
But Baerbock can also present concrete successes with feminist foreign policy: When the Taliban in Afghanistan banned women from working in humanitarian aid in the course of restricting women’s rights, there was a heated discussion within the United Nations. “We then said from this group of female foreign ministers: ‘Then we won’t take part anymore. We can’t be responsible for the fact that we are implementing the Taliban’s order and that the women all have to stay at home’.” According to Baerbock, this clear stance would not have existed without the strong network of women.
The minister also gets clues about how society is in flux from her daughters and in this context reports the only private anecdote of the evening: The younger one once looked out of the window when there was a construction site in front of the house and complained there is something wrong. When asked by the mother, who was stressed out in the morning, the child explained the mistake: “Only the men came to work today.”