Event with Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann

I have a rather poor opinion of most current politicians. An exception is Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann. I have seen her from time to time in short TV appearances and I have also read about her. All this made a positive impression on me. When I saw that she was due to talk at an event at the University of Mainz on Saturday I decided to go there and Eva, who also previously had a positive impression of the speaker, accompanied me. What we experienced at the event strengthened our previous opinion. The speaker came in with a microphone in a very modest way and just started to talk, without any introduction. Strack-Zimmermann is a member of the FDP and is their leading candidate for the coming European elections. This event was certainly part of her campaign for that election and was organized by her party. At the same time it should be emphasized that she did not say ‘vote for me’ but instead ‘go out and vote for a democratic party’, with a particular recommendation not to vote for the AfD or the party of Sahra Wagenknecht who have both explicitly said that they want Germany to leave the EU. I am not a devotee of the FDP. I find some of their policies good and others bad. I went to the event not because Strack-Zimmermann is a member of the FDP but also not in spite of that fact. My motivation was independent of the party she belongs to. We both thought that she made a milder impression than on TV. Probably the reason is that she was in a relatively friendly environment. When she is forced to defend herself against political attacks she is very capable of doing so and then she is less mild. At this event one person did shout out something about peace from the back row. This might have been due to the fact that Strack-Zimmermann is a strong and outspoken supporter of military intervention in the Ukraine by Germany and other Western countries or it might have had to do with Gaza. In any case she was easily able to handle it. In particular she repeated several times, ‘We all want peace’.

Strack-Zimmermann is chair of the defence committee in the German Parliament. Correspondingly her appearances in the media are often related to military themes. She was in the news recently because of her support of providing the Ukraine with the Taurus cruise missile, thus opposing the policy of Chancellor Scholz. She voted in favour of an initiative of the opposition party CDU that Taurus should be provided to the Ukraine. She was the only member of the government to do so. In her presentation yesterday she discussed many political themes and in particular how they all relate to each other. She is qualified to talk about these things because she has been more than once in the Ukraine during the present war, because she has been in other hotspots such as Mali and Niger, because she has spoken personally with one of the Israeli women taken hostage by Hamas and meanwhile released etc. For me it was refreshing to hear a politician talking in a way which struck me as honest, well-informed, experienced, rational and courageous. One thing which surprised me was what she said about the population of Europe compared to that of the world. She gave the figure 5% and I found that very low. In the internet I found the figure 10% which would have surprised me almost as much. Perhaps the explanation for the discrepancy in the figures is that I was not paying enough attention and she mentioned the population of the EU and in that case 5% could be correct. She talked about many political themes, including the Ukraine, China and Taiwan, the US and NATO, the Red Sea and the Houthis and of course Gaza. At the end of her presentation she took questions. An interesting one came from a young woman who identified herself as being in the army. She asked why the German army was not recruiting people from other European countries. Strack-Zimmermann pointed out the following problem. Soldiers in Germany are paid significantly better than soldiers in many other European countries. Thus the danger exists that if Germany tried to recruit in this way this might seriously weaken the armies of allied countries by draining the human resources. She indicated that discussions were underway to find an alternative.

This speech was not recorded but another presentation by Strack-Zimmermann can be found here:

There is quite a lot of overlap in the topics but it was more defiant in tone that what we heard live, as befits an election speech made to politicians.