German liberals send defence expert into tripartite EU election leadership team

The European liberals’ three-person lead candidate team will include the German defence policy expert Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann on behalf of ALDE, her party has announced.

From 6 to 9 June, Europeans are heading to the polls to elect a new European Parliament. The liberal centrist Renew Europe group in the European Parliament will send three candidates into the race, one for each party belonging to the group.

While the ALDE party, the European Democratic Party (EDP), and Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance party will run on a common election platform and a joint party programme, each will have their own lead candidate.

Germany’s liberals, the business-friendly FDP, will represent ALDE in the lead candidate team through the 66-year-old defence policy expert Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann.

“We will put her forward alongside thirteen other ALDE parties,” FDP party chief Christian Lindner said in Berlin on Monday (11 March). Strack-Zimmermann will be officially confirmed at the party’s congress on 20 March.

Sources familiar with the matter say she amounted to a second choice after the liberals’ big names like Estonian PM Kaja Kallas and Luxembourg’s former prime minister Xavier Bettel bowed out.

The lead candidates of the three liberal parties will be formally announced on 20 March, when Renew Europe formally kicks off its election campaign. Alongside the official confirmation of the three top candidates, Renew Europe will also pass its joint election programme, which was leaked to Euractiv last week.

ALDE itself will adopt its own party programme shortly before the congress.

Strack-Zimmermann outlined three priorities in Berlin: defence, bureaucracy, and the rule of law.

The expert, who chairs the Bundestag’s defence committee, said European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen had “not sufficiently prioritised” defence issues, despite her long previous tenure as the German minister of defence, and failed to plan for a second Trump administration in the US.

Instead, von der Leyen had focused on the Green Deal, run by then-Commission vice-president Frans Timmermans, adding a “bureaucratic burden”, Strack-Zimmermann said, explaining that the proposed supply chain law, for example, would have obliged coffee importers to ensure that “every bean is free from forced labour”.

On the rule of law, she stressed that “Europe is a union of values” and “rule of law is a value in and of itself”.

EU countries like Hungary, with a record of democratic backsliding, “have to expect that we take away their voting rights, as the treaties allow”, she stressed – a procedure outlined in Article 7 of the Treaty on European Union in case a country “seriously and persistently breaches the principles on which the EU is founded”.

The vocal politician – her party has made “Combative in Europe” their slogan – can be expected to make an impact in Brussels, where politicians tend to be more soft-spoken and ready to compromise.

But she had a message for Berlin, too: “I am not gone, even when I am gone.”

[Edited by Zoran Radosavljevic/Oliver Noyan]