Dhat the best-known politician of a governing party does not sit on the government bench herself, but in parliament, is more the exception than the rule. This is especially true for the Free Democrats, whose proportion of women in the leadership ranks is so low that even they themselves see it as a deficit. The defense politician Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann has found a role as chairwoman of the Defense Committee of the Bundestag, which gives her a lot of attention not only in this field of politics, but on the entire Berlin political stage.
Attention peaked last weekend. The reason for this was an open confrontation that she fought with the SPD parliamentary group leader Rolf Mützenich via Twitter: He assumed that Strack-Zimmermann’s urging that Germany had to deliver Leopard tanks to Ukraine would soon lead to calls for the delivery of aircraft and follow the deployment of soldiers. The FDP politician and others “talk us into a military conflict,” said Mützenich. She replied that Mützenich was “the symbol of all the central failures of German foreign policy”; his “views of yesterday lead to the problems of tomorrow”.