A delegation of German parliamentarians announced that they would travel to Taiwan on Sunday January 8, before a ministerial visit planned for this year, initiatives that could increase tensions with China. Johannes Vogel, of the liberal FDP party, a member of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s coalition, posted on Twitter a photo of him and his colleague Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann on board “the plane to Taiwan“. MPs hearshow (their) solidarity with the people of Taiwan through this trip“, said Thursday to AFP Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann, president of the Defense Committee of the Bundestag.
This trip should be followed in the spring by a visit by the German Minister of Education, Bettina Stark-Watzinger, also from the FDP, AFP learned on Thursday from a parliamentary source. It would be the first German ministerial visit to Taiwan in 26 years. The delegation of parliamentarians should meet, during its visit organized from Monday January 9 to Thursday January 12, representatives of the government and the opposition as well as organizations for the defense of human rights, representatives of the economy and the military, said before their trip Bettina Strack-Zimmermann.
Read alsoGermany plans to toughen ties with China
These German diplomatic initiatives are likely to cause tensions with Beijing, which opposes visits by foreign MPs, qualified as interference in its internal affairs. Relations between Beijing and Taipei, already tense, deteriorated sharply in 2022, Beijing having multiplied military maneuvers around the island which it considers part of its territory to be reconquered one day, by force if necessary.
The most significant were carried out in retaliation for a visit to the island by Nancy Pelosi, then Democratic Speaker of the US House of Representatives. China opposes any official exchange between foreign countries and Taiwan. In August, the German army reinforced its presence in the Pacific with the deployment of 13 military aircraft, a year after sending a frigate to the region for the first time in nearly twenty years.
SEE ALSO – Visiting Taiwan, the call to “counter the advance of autocracies” of a former NATO chief