Frauke Brosius-Gersdorf: This is how the prevented judge fights

Markus Lanz switched on the highest level of his drama mode. “Left-wing extremist” or “Victim of a campaign?” Asks the ZDF moderator to the cameras late Tuesday evening and makes a particularly serious face.

Then he quickly reveals a clear tendency: “It has gotten into an indignation tower completely through no fault of your own.”

She, that is Frauke Brosius-Gersdorf, 54 years old, law professor from Potsdam. She sits directly opposite him, other talk show guests are not visible for the time being. Brosius-Gersdorf looks rigid through her glasses and presses her lips together, her long hair combed her back strictly. “There were definitely better times in my life,” she says. “You couldn’t have imagined that in your worst dreams.”

She reports that she also received threats by e-mail at her university, she also had off-road pieces with suspicious content. “As a precaution, I had to ask my employees not to work on the chair.”

The renowned constitutional lawyer seems visibly touched. The way in which even a Catholic archbishop has drawn about her: “I think the infam!”

For about a week, Frauke Brosius-Gersdorf has been at the center of a political and cultural big battle. She is the most competitive judge candidate who has ever existed in the Federal Republic. (The much more numerous judges candidates are expressly meant.)

Last Friday, the nomination agreed by the CDU, CSU, SPD and the Greens and confirmed in the responsible committee shortly before the election date in the Bundestag. Union faction leader Jens Spahn had previously pulled “the emergency brake” in view of the growing resistance. So he later formulated it himself.

The embarrassing cancellation was a parliamentary premiere. She duped CDU Chancellor Friedrich Merz and his parliamentary group leader, hidden the federal government’s start-up balance and unsettled the black and red coalition, which wanted to do everything much better than the traffic lights.

Even if the Chancellor should be right with his assessment that most Germans only pursue the scandal “from the corner of the eye”: People would definitely look closely if his federal government fell over the affair.

In short, there has never been such a situation in the Bundestag. And what has never existed: a controversial constitutional judge like Brosius-Gersdorf. This not only affects their very pointed statements on difficult topics such as abortion, gender parity among optional lists and the corona vaccination, but also their offensive defense against the attacks.

On Tuesday morning, she published an explanation in which she defended a campaign against herself. The reporting “in parts of the media”? “Incorrectly and incomplete, unreasonable and non -transparent”. That it is called “ultralinks” or “left -wing radical”? “Defaming and unrealistic”.

On Tuesday evening, Brosius-Gersdorf then sits in her hometown of Hamburg in the Lanz studio and says that she puts every factual criticism, even if she is hard and tight. The freedom of expression and press applies to them. But there are limits, and they were not observed by individual journalists and politicians.

This development is worried, says the professor. “If you do that with me, we have to ask ourselves what happens in really difficult times.”

The candidate appears visibly touched because of her person’s politicization. “I’m neither with Ludwig Erhard nor with Rosa Luxemburg,” she says. “I am a scientist!” She does not want to accept that a political argument has other rules than an academic debate. “Actually, the focus of my work is school law, constitutional law and social security law,” she says. Unfortunately, nobody wrote about it.

Brosius-Gersdorf is not a guest at Lanz on Tuesday evening. A year ago, she said on the show that an AfD ban proceedings “are a very strong sign of our defensive democracy that she defends herself against enemies of the constitution”. Then she added: It was correct that “of course the followers are not eliminated”.

The sentence was dissected by AfD boss Alice Weidel in the Bundestag debate on Friday. “This is the language of her candidate for the highest court,” she called to the SPD – “which only regrets that you cannot eliminate our ten million voters!”

At this point, Brosius-Gersdorf is self-critical at her current Lanz step. This “a wording” was “not happy”, she says. But, she immediately pushes: “Of course, everyone who has seen the show in entirely knows what I meant: that with a party ban procedure, the problems do not eliminate the people to turn away from the democratic center.”

In this tone it continues. The scientist confronts Lanz with her testimony during Corona pandemic: “You can even think about whether there is now a constitutional obligation to introduce an obligation to vaccinate.” Brosius-Gersdorf seems unmoved. “But the word ‘thinking’ is decisive, Mr. Lanz,” she replies. “This is what we lawyers do every day.”

Finally, land comes on the subject of abortion. Brosius-Gersdorf had been assumed that she wanted to legitimize the abortion until birth.

She vehemently contradicts. “If you compare the right of life of the embryo and the fundamental rights of the woman with the same protection,” she says, “then you can never justify the termination of pregnancy, not even in cases of medical indication.” She wanted to point out this legal dilemma alone.

“What’s next?” Asks Markus Lanz in the end. “It’s a good question,” replies the candidate. “This is certainly not the right time to decide this tonight.”

For her, the question is “really not easy”: “It is no longer just about me, Mr. Lanz. It is also about what happens when such campaigns – and in some cases a campaign – prevail. What does that with us, what does the country with democracy … I have to weigh that.”

So it seems possible that Brosius-Gersdorf does not start. The SPD itself will not withdraw your candidate, the parliamentary group made it clear. If you listen to the Union faction, the constitutional lawyer’s medial strike has rather reinforced the resistance among the MPs.

So the location remains at most complicated. On Tuesday evening, the CSU research minister Dorothee Bär was also on a talk show, at Sandra Maischberger in the ARD. “We have a lot of responsible MPs,” she said. “And if they say I can’t choose with my certain wife Brosius-Gersdorf, then I accept that, then I respect it-and then I also expect the candidate to think about whether she is the right one.”