Greens federal manager Kellner defends Chancellor candidate Baerbock. He doesn’t want to speak publicly about the internal handling of possible errors.
Greens Federal Managing Director Michael Kellner considers the debate about plagiarism allegations against Chancellor candidate Annalena Baerbock to be exaggerated.
“Criticism is completely legitimate (…), only we can see that even small things are exaggerated,” said Kellner in the ZDF “morning magazine”. When the allegation of copyright infringement arose, the party wanted to put a stop sign.
“Both our lawyer and many others say: This is not a copyright infringement.” When asked how several mistakes could have happened in Baerbock’s election campaign in the past few weeks, Kellner said: “We criticize maneuvers internally. I wouldn’t do that through the ‘Morgenmagazin’ now.”
At the beginning of the week, the Austrian media scientist Stefan Weber first looked at several places in Baerbock’s book “Jetzt. How we are renewing our country ”, which have striking similarities to other publications. The Greens reject the allegation of alleged copyright infringement and argue, like the publisher, that the reproduction of generally known facts is unproblematic.
On Deutschlandfunk, Kellner said: “It’s not a scientific work, it’s a non-fiction book about what drives you, what you want to achieve in politics, what you want to implement.”
On Thursday evening, Baerbock said in a conversation with journalists from the magazine “Brigitte”: “A lot of ideas from others were incorporated”. And further: “But I have not written a non-fiction book or something, but what I want to do with this country – and on the other side described the world as it is, based on facts and realities.” You think it is important to be self-critical, but also to make it clear what you stand for and reject false claims, said Baerbock.
Even the chairman of the Left, Susanne Hennig-Wellsow, the debate goes too far. She jumped Baerbock aside and defended the 40-year-old. “Whether a candidate for chancellor needs a book, I don’t know, but that we only talk about it, I find really worrying,” said Hennig-Wellsow to the “Spiegel”. “It’s not about footnotes in books, it’s about the future of this country.”
After Baerbock’s nomination for Chancellor candidate in mid-April, the party initially experienced a high-altitude flight: With polls of up to 28 percent, it even overtook the CDU / CSU at times. With the debate about inaccurate information in Baerbock’s curriculum vitae and late payments reported to the Bundestag, the values began to decline.
While the Union was able to gain 4 percentage points compared to the previous month, according to a recent YouGov survey, the Greens, with a loss of 3 points, are at 19 percent and thus in second place, followed by the SPD, which is stable at 15 percent.
Among the three candidates for Chancellor, Baerbock is with 15 percent behind Federal Finance Minister Olaf Scholz (SPD) with 16 percent and NRW Prime Minister Armin Laschet (CDU) with 21 percent. YouGov’s online survey was conducted between June 25th and 28th – before the plagiarism allegations against Baerbock became known.
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