Why Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann is voting against Olaf Scholz

There is a problem with journalistic products that are created in the middle of a week in which the Bundestag is in session. You will quickly be overtaken by what is happening. It has always been like this. And this is even more true since a traffic light coalition is in power, whose members, due to their mutual dislike, do not always know what they will do for each other tomorrow. Or not.

Caution is therefore advised when it comes to what will happen in the Bundestag on Thursday – and why, to put it mildly, it is remarkable. So what follows is the status now, Tuesday evening, 6 p.m.

What we know: FDP defense politician Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann wants to agree to an opposition proposal from the Union. What we don’t know is how many Liberal MPs will join her. And whether Strack-Zimmermann will also agree to a proposal from the traffic light coalition – or whether she will abstain.

Sounds a bit irrelevant? It’s not at all. Of course, applications are not laws. They are recommendations to the federal government from which not much has to follow. In this specific case, however, it is about nothing less than self-assurance of German support for Ukraine in a highly critical phase of the war. It’s about a once peace-loving party and its chancellor.

For Strack-Zimmermann, it’s ultimately about a promise. And about their conviction, their credibility.

Strack-Zimmermann was always a critic of Scholz

The FDP politician evaded party discipline on Thursday. Strack-Zimmermann is now her party’s top candidate for the European elections. She is so free.

After two years of dissatisfaction with Olaf Scholz, she now openly agrees with the CDU and CSU’s opposition to the Chancellor. The liberal was always one of his harshest critics in the traffic lights. Emphasis on: in the traffic lights. If you will, this special relationship between two politicians born in 1958 who never really developed an understanding for each other is now ending.

As chairwoman of the Defense Committee, Strack-Zimmermann has advocated for German arms deliveries to Ukraine since the Russian attack. “Don’t hesitate, don’t hesitate, that’s the order of the day,” she called into the hall at the FDP party conference in April 2022. The delegates celebrated with applause that lasted for several minutes. Her speech was understood as what it should be: an announcement to a hesitant chancellor.

In the months that followed, it went like this: Scholz decided what Strack-Zimmermann demanded – in her eyes, always too late. She didn’t always find only critical words for the Chancellor. “I wouldn’t describe him as humorless. There are certainly moments that made me smile. But he didn’t invent explaining,” she said last summer star-Conversation.

“Wow, the old woman is annoying”

What the Chancellor said about her is not all that well documented. Scholz usually saves public headnotes for colleagues. She hasn’t forgotten the fact that he once called Strack-Zimmermann and other critical MPs these “boys and girls”. And what Scholz’s foreign policy advisor is said to have said at one of her appearances is suggested by the person concerned by constantly repeating it for the bon mot archive: “Wow, the old woman is annoying.”

If you don’t find it annoying, you’ll find it great. With her commitment to Ukraine, Strack-Zimmermann has built up a stable circle of supporters in social networks. Which wasn’t particularly helpful when she found herself in a credibility dilemma in January. The largest opposition faction had set a parliamentary trap for her. The CDU and CSU submitted a motion that also called for Taurus deliveries, the cruise missiles that Ukraine would like so much – and that Strack-Zimmermann has been promoting for a long time.

Nevertheless, she voted against this motion. What should not be worth mentioning for a member of a government faction brought her a lot of criticism. The accusation: In questions of war and peace, one’s own conscience must be more important than parliamentary customs. Strack-Zimmermann promised: “An application from the traffic light parties must and will be submitted by February at the latest, which includes the delivery of Taurus and further support for Ukraine. No ifs or buts.”

The SPD has moved

It is now the end of February. The traffic light groups will submit their proposal on Thursday. The Taurus does not appear – at least it is not mentioned by name. However, there is a passage in the document that describes very specifically what needs to be done. Germany should supply weapons systems that should enable Ukraine to carry out “targeted attacks on strategically relevant targets far in the rear of the Russian aggressor” in accordance with international law.

This can only mean the Taurus, says Strack-Zimmermann. And still not satisfied. The application covers much more than arms deliveries alone. Ukraine must win the defensive battle and get back all its territories, it says. Crimea must be liberated. Germany has not distanced itself sufficiently from Putin’s regime in the past.

The text is written with a clarity that, for many Social Democrats, only just misses the betrayal of all of the Federal Republic’s foreign policy traditions. Strack-Zimmermann knows this. She also counts it as her success. The motion shows, she says, “that our pressure and the pressure of current events on the SPD have finally had an effect.”

Still, it doesn’t help: she wanted Taurus, and Taurus isn’t included. That’s why she votes with the Union. So she’s doing what she didn’t want to do in January. Is this how you gain credibility?

A “flying dwarf” helps

An interjection from Bordesholm helps to summarize the Taurus weeks between the Chancellor and the Grand Dame of the FDP in this remarkable week. Ralf Stegner, SPD leftist from Schleswig-Holstein and a decidedly different opinion than Strack-Zimmermann on questions of Ukraine support, comments on their situation with this comparison:

“In chess, the queen is an important piece and should not be underestimated in the attack.” What you can read like this: She has achieved and achieved a lot. The traffic light proposal would not be as clear without them. Even the competition recognizes this.

Stegner goes on to say: “If you make too bold, thoughtless moves or lack flank protection, you can easily end up in danger.” She promised a lot. Maybe more than she could deliver. This now makes them once again vulnerable to criticism from all sides.

“Sometimes it is sacrificed and in the end it is always the king who decides the game.”

The FDP cannot afford to vote for the Union proposal with Strack-Zimmermann. Or to seek a break with the SPD, when you were able to anchor so many of your own beliefs in the joint proposal. Why? In the end, Olaf Scholz decides anyway.

Stegner only forgot one aspect in his analogy: Strack-Zimmermann is leaving the Berlin chessboard for Brussels and Strasbourg anyway. It is therefore not without a certain irony that CDU leader Friedrich Merz had to come to save Strack-Zimmermann’s European election campaign from a false start. In a week in which FDP General Secretary Bijan Djir-Sarai has awakened black-yellow coalition desires, the woman who repeatedly mocks Merz as a “flying midget” – most recently a week ago – voted with the Union in the good old bourgeois tradition.