The Union wants to vote again in the Bundestag on the delivery of the Taurus cruise missile to Ukraine – according to SPD General Secretary Kevin Kühnert, it cannot count on a majority thanks to further votes from the traffic light coalition.
In response to a corresponding question, Kühnert said on Thursday evening on the ZDF program “Maybrit Illner”: “No, I don’t think so, we have a coalition agreement with each other in which it is clearly stipulated that the coalition partners agree on political content together and not “Agree with opposition motions, even if Ms. Strack-Zimmermann saw things differently in the last week of the meeting.”
Another vote next week?
The Union wants to have another vote on the Taurus delivery next week. Two weeks ago, the parliamentary group had already failed with a similar proposal in the Bundestag. From the traffic light coalition, only the chairwoman of the defense committee, Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann, voted in favor. The FDP politician has already announced that she will also approve the new proposal. “My opinion is known and will not change. I will behave accordingly in further votes,” she told the news portal “t-online”.
The deputy FDP chairman Wolfgang Kubicki had already announced in the “Münchner Merkur” at the beginning of the week that he now wanted to vote for a new Union proposal – which had not yet been announced at the time. “Last time, at least a dozen other colleagues I know would have loved to have agreed to the Union proposal, but they submitted to coalition discipline. I was close to that too,” said Kubicki. “This time it would be the point for me to do it.”
SPD General Secretary: SPD stands by Chancellor
Kühnert said the Union was free to request whatever it thought was right. “But I’m also free to see it as a certain degree of slapstick now.” All debates in the Bundestag on the topic only revolved around the Taurus. “If we get the motion back, then it will be voted on again. And then I can only speak for my own ranks and say: everyone in the SPD stands by what the Chancellor said.”
Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) rejects the delivery of the Taurus missiles with a range of 500 kilometers to Ukraine because he fears that this could drag Germany into the war. On Monday last week he publicly justified his rejection for the first time. “What the British and French are doing in terms of target control and the accompaniment of target control cannot be done in Germany,” said the Chancellor at the dpa editorial conference in chief.
British deny using their own forces in Ukraine
He left it open exactly what he meant by that. However, the sentence was understood by some as an indication that the French and British would support the control of their Storm Shadow and Scalp cruise missiles, which were delivered to Ukraine, with their own forces. The British government immediately denied this.
Regarding the arguments put forward by Scholz, Kühnert said that the Chancellor had also been forced to reveal his arguments by people in the areas of defense and foreign policy and with access to intelligence information. They would have known what was now being said. “I really regret that it had to be this way” – but he also thinks that the damage to the land is being made worse than it actually is. This is also shown by the visit of British Foreign Minister David Cameron to Berlin this Thursday.
Scholz is not only in a foreign policy environment, but also in a domestic policy environment and takes people’s concerns seriously, said Kühnert. He must take full responsibility for the decision about a Taurus delivery. Regarding the accusation that the SPD wanted to run the election campaign as a peace party, Kühnert said: “That is an infamous accusation that does not do justice to the significance of the entire decision.” He doesn’t want the goal of peace in Europe to be dragged into the mud.
The CDU defense politician Roderich Kiesewetter sharply criticized the Chancellor in the ZDF broadcast. It’s about showing confidence towards Ukraine and strength towards Russia. “The Chancellor is not showing any strength,” he said.
Concerns about Germany’s involvement in the war
According to surveys, people in Germany are critical of a Taurus delivery. According to a survey published on Thursday by the Infratest dimap institute, 61 percent of those surveyed reject a Taurus delivery. The rejection is similarly high, according to a survey published on Wednesday by the opinion research institute YouGov on behalf of the German Press Agency. Accordingly, 58 percent are against the delivery of this weapon system and only 28 percent are in favor.
