Annalena Baerbock – suddenly a career for women is a scandal

A woman who led German foreign policy for three years takes over an international post. A logical development might think: Annalena Baerbock is to become chair of the UN General Assembly. A boring news that is usually enough for a short mention. Instead, the news bursts into political Berlin like a bomb.

Because the post was actually promised by careered diplomat Helga Schmid. The woman, who has been unexcited for decades and has shaped Germany’s diplomatic representation in the background, is now supposed to give way for the star politician Baerbock. Scandal!

Baerbock, which made feminist foreign policy the guideline of its ministry, actually wanted to bring more diplomats to the Federal Foreign Office. Now she is doing exactly the opposite: she displaces a woman from her post to fill the position herself. Double scandal!

Sure, this step is not stringent. But power is not given away – it is taken. And it is remarkable how quickly the same people who constantly explain women, they should be more ambitious, hold this ambition as soon as they show it. If Baerbock were a man and would push another man out of office, hardly anyone would take note of it.

Instead, the current Foreign Minister is referred to by the former chairman of the Munich Security Conference, Christoph Heusgen. A woman who is just 44 years old and has led the largest economy in Europe through a war on her own continent should suddenly be too old and consumed?

For Helga Schmid, “The best and most internationally experienced German diplomat”, as Heusgen calls her, the decision is undoubtedly painful. Personally, the resentment is understandable. But this is how the political company works: strategy and power are part of the game. Schmid knew that when she chose this career. If women would not play along, there would be no politicians.

You can get upset that politics works like this. But then please without a double standard – not only to expect from women to behave more morally. Where was the outrage when the former FDP general secretary Bijan Djir-Sarai had to bear the consequences for the mistakes of the then party chairman Christian Lindner? We remember: Djir-Sarai resigned because of the FDP “D-Day paper”-so that Lindner didn’t have to do it.

Where was the outcry at the time that Lindner was a “discontinued model” for the FDP? Or that it is an “insolence” that he prevails in terms of power to the end and even sacrifices his own people?

This excitement around Baerbock shows that women are still assessed according to other standards. Not even the private and personal side of her decision can really affect her in the eyes of the public: that she said after the election that she would withdraw from politics to take care of her family more is now being kept.

That her two children move to New York, that this UN post certainly means less workload than the office of Foreign Minister-all of this is not taken into account. That Baerbock may have made this decision for this reason.

This decision is not clever. Baerbock and her team will have been aware of which image she creates. Perhaps this also has to do with when the message was announced: namely immediately after the historical debt vote in the Bundestag. Possibly in the hope that it will go down in the political tumult.

You can only say: fair. Because Baerbock knows exactly what double standards women are judged in politics. The truth is: with nicity you can’t get to the top. Men know that. It is time for women to no longer justify that they understood it.