Status: 02.08.2022 5:47 p.m
She had an eventful political life, Trude Unruh fought passionately for the rights of the elderly. Only now has it become known that the founder of the Gray Panthers died in November last year.
The founder of the Senior Citizens’ Protection Association and the Gray Panther party, Trude Unruh, is dead. She died in November last year, but her death has only just become known. Unruh was 96 years old.
She was seen as a combative, sometimes polarizing person of conviction in the fight for the rights of the elderly. Politically she had many homelands: in 1968 she joined the SPD because of Gustav Heinemann and his commitment against rearmament, campaigned for comprehensive schools and for better educational opportunities for women and in 1969 founded her first citizens’ initiative for the regulation of deadlines for abortions.
A few years later she left the SPD again, went to the FDP, then to the right-wing ecological Green Action Future, to the Pensioners’ Party and to the Citizens’ Party. She never became a member of the Greens, but in 1987 she entered the Bundestag for the party – as a representative of the Senior Citizens Protection Association, which she had co-founded in 1975. The club later gave itself the nickname Graue Panther.
Fight against scandalous conditions in homes
In 1989 she finally founded the party Die Grauen after members of the Grauen Panther accused her of politicizing the senior citizens’ protection association. “It’s terrible to have apolitical people around you,” said Unruh at the time. “If you turn on the flame in the morning, that’s energy policy. That’s how you have to see it.” The Greens expelled her from the parliamentary group for founding the party competition.
The reason for getting involved for the rights of the elderly was said to have been a friend of her mother-in-law, who was put up in a 20-bed room in an old people’s home. According to the motto “We don’t put up with anything”, Unruh aggressively criticized scandalous conditions in old people’s homes, organized sheltered apartments and shared apartments for seniors and campaigned for a law for the protection of the elderly.
Donation scandals at party and club
The Grauen Panther association later had to contend with great difficulties: in 1998 it had accumulated debts of 20 million marks, but was able to continue with a new legal structure. Then in 2011 investigations into a scandal involving donation fraud – other board members were convicted, Unruh did not have to testify. The investigations against the then 86-year-old had been discontinued because of severe dementia.
The party Die Grauen, which she chaired until 2007, dissolved in 2008 because of a donation scandal. Today there is a successor party of the same name.