When Annalena Baerbock is looking for the right passage in the pile of papers on her knees, she is not yet a candidate for Chancellor.

It is the beginning of 2019, and the debate is raging in Berlin about the classification of the Maghreb states as safe countries of origin.

The Greens are against it.

For many in the party, this is a moral issue.

Baerbock talks about the conditions under which freedom from persecution in the country of origin can be assumed.

Now she has found the sentence in the judgment of the Federal Constitutional Court from 1996 and reads it out loud.

Helene Bubrowski

Political correspondent in Berlin.

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    Such stories shaped the public image of the Green party leaders.

    The woman with a master's degree in international law from a renowned London university who rolls her eyes when the co-chairman Robert Habeck doesn't get right to the point in a press conference.

    Who manages to drive to the Paris climate conference with an infant in her arms.

    Her sentence that Habeck comes from “chickens, pigs, milking cows”, while she “comes from international law”, sounded arrogant, but in essence many who had had political dealings with Baerbock agreed: CDU politicians who were involved she sat in the Jamaica soundings, praising her detailed knowledge, green party friends report her feeling for ticking bombs and how often she managed to defuse them before the public got wind of them.

    Suddenly she seems unprofessional

    Suddenly this picture seems shaken. Some political opponents can hardly hide the schadenfreude. Greens are in need of explanation, there is also head shaking. It is the first time in a long time that you hear resentment about your own party leader. Baerbock made mistakes, a few too many. Instead of sure-footed and perfectionist, she suddenly appears unprofessional.

    First it came out that she had to report additional income to the Bundestag administration. She had received a total of around 25,220 euros from the party in 2018, 2019 and 2020, including a Christmas bonus and a corona-related special payment. Members of parliament are obliged to indicate the amount by which they earn additional income. Baerbock and the Greens strongly advocate tightening these rules. But the party leader was not so precise in her own affairs.

    She sat on a talk show and said that she was "madly annoyed". And then you wanted to look ahead and better explain your own concepts for the CO2 price. That was the plan. Markus Söder, the Bavarian Prime Minister, says he wants to join the CSU "on the bright side of power". By then the Greens had already spread out. But the green ones know how quickly it can get dark again. So now special care was the motto. But it was too late for that.

    Baerbock's curriculum vitae has long been online. The American foundation German Marshall Fund was named under the heading “Memberships”, although Baerbock was only an alumna of a scholarship program of the organization, as research by the FAZ had shown. And she is also said to have been a member of the UN refugee agency UNHCR, which is not possible at all. Contrary to the information, Baerbock has already resigned from an advisory board of the Heinrich Böll Foundation. The information was corrected on Saturday.