Former Bundestag Vice President Antje Vollmer was one of the Green politicians who were valued far beyond the borders of their party. Equipped with a healthy instinct for power, she was seen as a mediator between seemingly insurmountable positions. She died on Wednesday at the age of 79.
She died peacefully with her family after a long, serious illness, her son Johann Vollmer told the German Press Agency on Thursday. Between 1994 and 2005, the doctor of theology was a member of her party’s Bundestag and Vice-President of the Bundestag. “I bow to a big Green,” wrote party veteran Jürgen Trittin on Twitter.
The Bundestag interrupted an ongoing debate on the 49-euro ticket for a minute’s silence on Thursday. Acting President Yvonne Magwas (CDU) expressed Parliament’s sympathy to Vollmer’s family and asked MPs to pause briefly to commemorate Vollmer.
From 1983 in the Bundestag
“She was there from the start and fought through a lot of what we are benefiting from today,” wrote Vollmer’s party colleague Katrin Göring-Eckardt on Twitter. “And she kept her own head, unbending! Thank you Antje.” Göring-Eckardt followed Vollmer in 2005 as Green Vice-President of the Bundestag.
The parliamentary group leaders Britta Haßelmann and Katharina Dröge and the two party leaders Ricarda Lang and Omid Nouripour recalled Vollmer’s work in a joint statement. “Even after leaving the Bundestag, she shaped our party and our country as a whole through her political and social commitment,” wrote the top Greens. “Antje Vollmer was known for consistently representing her opinion, values and convictions. She was quite argumentative.”
The political director of the Greens, Emily Büning, also recalled Vollmer. “My thoughts are with their survivors. My heartfelt condolences,” wrote Büning.
Born in Westphalia, Vollmer (born March 31, 1943) entered the political arena in 1983. At that time, she moved into the Bundestag for the ecologically critical initiative “Bauernblatt” on the open list of the Greens.
In 1984 she was elected to the parliamentary group executive committee, which consisted exclusively of women – the party had proclaimed the “Feminat”. With Waltraud Schoppe and Annemarie Borgmann, Vollmer formed an equal trio as speakers. “The female 3-pointer was legendary,” wrote Göring-Eckardt on Twitter. Vollmer remained, with interruptions, one of the parliamentary group spokespersons until the West-Greens temporarily left the Bundestag at the end of 1990.
Criticism of recent Ukraine policy
From 1985 she had become increasingly involved in dialogue with incarcerated RAF prisoners. In the Greens, Antje Vollmer initially belonged more to the left wing and later tried to overcome the rifts between “Realos” and “Fundis” with the “Green Awakening” that she initiated in 1988. Vollmer never remained undisputed in his own party. For example, she opposed the German-German unity treaty, which she believed created unity in the “most expensive way possible”. Most recently, she had publicly criticized the course of the federal government in the Ukraine war.
In the early 1990s, Vollmer withdrew from party politics for a while. She worked in an epilepsy clinic in Bethel and was a publicist.
In the 1994 federal election, Vollmer returned to parliament via the Hessian state list and was – sensationally with votes from the governing coalition, but without those of the SPD – elected as the first Green politician to be vice-president of the Bundestag.
