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At the beginning, there were irregularities in her CV. Now she has a recently unearthed history of plagiarism in her book and the party tried its best to avoid confession of any wrongdoing. Also, there was a gender-related shitshow in Green primaries in Saarland. Basically the country leadership of the Green party hates the idea that a female #1 was voted out of the Saarland list three times in a row, thus giving an opportunity for a male candidate to lead the list (contrary to the Green rule that odd-numbered positions in a list, including #1, of course, must go to women). Saarland is small but still pretty prominent in German politics, generating a lot of federal-level politicians. And a lot of attention, because the story is pretty bizarre. The next chosen woman for #2, Irina Gaydukova, had a very bad interview that basically showed her unable to address very simple question and cast doubt on her ability to speak German at a professional level. It reminded some voters thad IdPol is sort-of tacky and the Green party is very deeply into IdPol. Baerbock does not seem to be a very strong candidate personally. She was basically chosen over Habeck because she was of the right gender, not because of any obvious political advantage over him. But Germany has had 16 years of female chancellorship by now, so the idea of having a woman run the country is no longer particularly new or attractive. But to be honest, all the leading candidates are fairly boring, perhaps with the exception of Olaf Scholz, who nevertheless leads a very dysfunctional party (SPD) and does not really have a shot. So it is a fight between equals in mediocrity. |
The CV irregularities seem to be rather minor (probably deliberate) miss-translations from English to German, if I understood it all correctly. Definitely not good, but hardly worthy of a proper scandal. The plagiarism stuff is all BS. Did someone use ctrl-c and ctrl-v? Yes. To an illegal or even immoral extent? IMO, no.