Kafka's children

This week's newsletter details a spectacular scandal inside the Green party.

Photo by Mitchell Luo on Unsplash

Dear Reader,

It didn’t get much attention outside of Germany, but a law passed by Olaf Scholz’ government in 2023 drew parallels to the Stasi and the Gestapo.

Pushed primarily by the Green party, the whistle-blower protection law mandated that companies with more than 50 staff set up “tip-off centres” where employees could anonymously report misdeeds within their company.

Additionally, the law established public tip-off points that allow people to report on public servants such as teachers or police officers who “make anti-constitutional statements below the threshold of criminal liability.”

The government trumpeted the law as an important mechanism for preventing a repeat of the white-collar fraud of recent years, such as the Wirecard and Dieselgate scandals, which went on for years unnoticed.

Anonymity was crucial, proponents said, because otherwise whistle-blowers would be too scared of repercussions to come forward.

As understandable as these motives are, people with longer memories immediately raised concerns about potential abuse of the system.

Hubertus Knabe, a former director of the Hohenschönhausen Memorial, a museum on the site of the Stasi’s former political prison in Berlin, said the law would create a “huge surveillance apparatus.” It risked creating a culture of denunciation similar to the one that existed in the GDR, Knabe stated.

"It is just a small step from a tip-off to a denunciation," Mr Knabe said, pointing to the example of Nazi Germany, where Germans fervently snitched on their neighbours "for personal advantage or for revenge." The result would be "an atmosphere of fear similar to those seen in dictatorships."

But Knabe’s views obviously don’t carry much weight in the Green party.

Eager to set an example to the rest of society, the eco-party has set up inner-party ombudsmen (or ombudspeople, as they call them!) for complaints on issues such as sexual harassment and financial sleaze.

Such a system would ensure maximum transparency, giving members and voters alike confidence in the trustworthiness and integrity of the party, they believed.

All noble intentions. But look a little closer at the remit of ombudsperson for sexual violence and alarm bells start to ring. It promises both discretion for the accuser and bias in their favour.

“Communication about the incident takes place in consultation with the affected person in an anonymous form. Personal data, such as names, are not disclosed,” the ombudsman’s office states on its website.

Meanwhile, the legal concept of “in doubt, for the accused” is explicitly rejected. “The perspective of the complainant will guide our actions,” the ombudsman states. “Decisions on measures and steps in the intervention process are made on the basis of ‘in case of doubt, for the victim’”.

There are some protections for the accused too, though. “All participants are subject to a confidentiality agreement. This includes the maximum anonymity for both the complainant and the suspected person.”

How does this work in practice?

Recent complaints to the ombudsman against a senior Green MP has laid bare how open to exploitation this system is. In the truest sense of the word, it is Kafkaesque.

Central character in the drama is Stefan Gelbhaar, Bundestag MP since 2017, and the party’s transport spokesperson. As constituency MP for the Berlin district of Pankow, Gelbhaar is also the only directly elected Green MP in the whole of former East Germany.

After Olaf Scholz’ government collapsed in early November, the parties rushed to nominate their candidates for the snap election. In Pankow, Gelbhaar was a shoe-in; 98 percent of local party members voted for him to run again.

As is typical in the German electoral system, Gelbhaar also wanted to lock down his Bundestag seat by gaining a place on the party list. (Due to Germany’s PR voting system, politicians can make it into the Bundestag by winning a constituency or as a “list candidate” via the second vote on the ballot.)

In early December, he was supposed to contest the second spot on the party’s Berlin list against Andreas Audretsch, the man running the Green’s election campaign.

But, on the day of the vote, Gelbhaar unexpectedly pulled out. In a letter to colleagues, he said that he was under investigation by the ombudsman for sexual violence and wanted to focus on clearing up the charges.

Despite the ombudsman’s commitment to confidentiality, the complaints against Gelbhaar became widely known inside the party soon after they were made.

He had wanted to stand for nomination regardless, but people higher up in the party pressured him to stand down. Meanwhile, party insiders were anonymously briefing the press that he should withdraw his candidacy for the Pankow constituency, too.

All the while, Gelbhaar had no idea what he had been accused of, or who had accused him of doing it.

The local party in Pankow initially resisted pressure to nominate a new candidate, saying they wanted to wait for the ombudsman’s decision. But after a few days they too buckled to internal pressure and announced that they would rerun the nomination.

Still, Gelbhaar had no idea what he had been accused of, or who had accused him of doing it.

Then, on December 31st public broadcaster RBB ran a news segment in which it told the stories of several of Gelbhaar’s accusers. Actors playing the women recounted how he had forced one to kiss him, grabbed another’s backside, or even put sedatives into a woman’s drink.

For the first time, Gelbhaar had some concrete details on what he was being accused of. He took immediate legal action against the broadcaster, filing for an emergency injunction against the report.

From that point on the accusations began to collapse. And they did so spectacularly.

RBB argued that the women’s accounts were credible because they had signed sworn oaths. But, when the court looked at these oaths, it found that one had been signed by a woman who didn’t live at the address she had given, and another had only contacted the broadcaster by email.

RBB was told to verify its sources. But it couldn’t do so.

Instead it had to admit that it had been duped. Days later it admitted that that Gelbhaar’s central accuser, Anne K., hadn’t just made up her story - she didn’t even exist! “Further research led us to a local Green politician who we know beyond doubt to have created the persona Anne K. and who signed a sworn oath under this false identity,” the broadcaster admitted.

“We have also informed the Green party’s ombudsman because we have reason to believe that some complaints made to them also originated from this person,” the broadcaster added.

Since then, the allegations against Gelbhaar have collapsed like a house of cards. The court has since ordered RBB to retract all of the allegations, with the judge describing them as “completely lacking in substance.”

The Green party ombudsman is still investigating seven complaints, although nobody else knows anything about their nature, or who made them.

One of the plotters has been unmasked. A young woman called Shirin Kreße, apparently from the far left of the party, has left the Greens and is now facing criminal charges.

Still, tantalising questions remain unanswered. Why were the allegations made days before Gelbhaar was to stand for nomination? How many people were involved in the conspiracy? Did Audretsch, who won the list nomination unchallenged, have a hand in the affair (something he denies)?

Whatever else emerges, Gelbhaar’s political career would appear to be over. His local organisation in Pankow reran the nomination in early January and he lost the vote. For his local constituency, he was damaged goods.

What lessons will the Greens draw from this debacle?

Party bigwigs clearly don’t want to talk about it. “As Foreign Minister I can’t say anything about it, there are other challenges going on in the world,” Annalena Baerbock told a reporter with a forced smile when asked about the affair.

Robert Habeck, the party’s chancellor candidate, briefed journalists on the campaign trail that he wouldn’t answer any questions on the topic.

Others have been more forthcoming.

Özcan Mutlu, a former Bundestag MP who had been a party member for 35 years, quit in disgust this week.

“This is not an isolated incident,” Mutlu fumed in his resignation letter. The “perfidious” plot to destroy Gelbhaar “not only reveals the abyss of human behaviour, it exposes a profound problem: for some party functionaries, pursuing their own careers apparently counts for more than integrity, justice or decency.”

But, for the party’s powerful youth organisation, there is no scandal. For them, Gelbhaar is still a guilty man.

“We are a feminist party, and in a feminist party you believe the victims,” Jette Nietzard, head of the youth wing, insisted. “Stefan Gelbhaar is not the only man who has made mistakes in this party - or in any other one.”

“The presumption of innocence applies in court. But we are an organization, we are not a court,” Nietzard added, threateningly.

One could object that the Greens aren’t just any organisation, they are one that writes the laws of this country. If they had their way, would we all have to live according to their obscure conception of justice?

Do we already?

---