The former Vice President of the Bundestag, Antje Vollmer, is dead. She died peacefully on Wednesday with her family after a long, serious illness, her son Johann Vollmer told the German Press Agency on Thursday. The former Green politician was 79 years old. Between 1994 and 2005, the doctor of theology was a member of her party’s Bundestag and Vice-President of the Bundestag.
Green politician Katrin Göring-Eckardt, currently Vice-President of the Bundestag, wrote on Twitter that Vollmer had “fought through much of what we are benefiting from today.” The deceased “kept her own head” and was inflexible.
Former CDU Minister Peter Altmaier praised Vollmer on Twitter as an “uncomfortable reminder, an unwavering humanist and an important political personality”. Vollmer did a lot to turn the Greens from a left-wing protest movement into a democratic parliamentary party.
Vollmer, born in 1943, came to the Bundestag for the Greens in 1983 and was thus a member of the first Green faction. For three years she served as group leader. When the Greens missed the five percent hurdle in 1990, Vollmer initially left parliament, to which she returned in 1994 and became its vice-president at the same time. She held this post until she retired as an MP in 2005. As a committed pacifist, Vollmer had previously spoken out vehemently against military interventions in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq and was thus sidelined in her party. In 2005 she voluntarily renounced a political mandate.
Even after her time in the Bundestag, Vollmer remained true to her ideals and continued to participate in the political debate. In April 2022, she signed an open letter to Chancellor Olaf Scholz asking him to stop arms sales to Ukraine. Vollmer also applauded the “Manifesto for Peace” recently launched by Alice Schwarzer and Sahra Wagenknecht.
