Lena Schilling stands on a stage and shouts: “Climate!” Then she holds the microphone up to the crowd, who chant: “Protection!” It’s Tuesday this week, the Greens are celebrating the start of their European election campaign in Vienna and the party sees their 23-year-old top candidate from her good side: fresh, cheeky and with a firm intention to improve the world. But on the same day an article is published that suggests that Lena Schilling could also have, well, a less good side.
The default writes that Schilling has one “problematic relationship to truth”; It plays people off against each other, endangers livelihoods and leaves behind scorched earth. That’s what around 50 friends, party friends and climate activists say default interviewed in the past few weeks. According to this, Schilling had invented harassment (against herself) and affairs, and once she even had to sign a cease-and-desist declaration: Schilling had claimed that a – now former – friend had been beaten by her husband and had even suffered a miscarriage as a result of an attack. When the allegations became public, there was a lot of noise default Hearing from those around the Greens that they are just “the tip of the iceberg”.
On Wednesday morning, the Green Party grandees stood in front of the media, side by side and, so to speak, in front of the top candidate Schilling: Werner Kogler (party leader and vice-chancellor), Sigrid Maurer (club chairman), Leonore Gewessler (vice party leader and energy minister) and Stefan Kaineder (vice federal spokesman). What was then trumpeted to the public from this insulted wagon castle was arrogant and painfully amateurish. According to the Green Party leadership, the allegations have no “political tangent” and are therefore “irrelevant” to Schilling’s candidacy. Aha, so what Schilling, a person of public interest, does privately doesn’t matter? Personality is not important for managing people – Schilling would have some employees in Brussels?
Nobody addressed the content of the allegations at this press conference, not Schilling, not Kogler, Gewessler, Maurer or Kaineder. Instead, Sigrid Maurer said: “When a young woman stands up and has a strong opinion, that is in itself a provocation.” Seriously, the women’s card? So you attack Schilling because she is a woman, because she is young? And not because she might have done something wrong? Kogler ultimately said that “dirty buckets had been filled and now emptied.” The allegations are “anonymous grumbling and farting.” Are you crazy?
It would have been right to stand up and say: There is no prejudice, but we are taking the matter seriously because the allegations come from friends and party friends and were expressed in a reputable newspaper. We check this, we create transparency.
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