How does it feel when you have just been put on a wanted list by Russia? Estonia’s Prime Minister Kaja Kallas doesn’t seem to care. In order to get from Tallinn to Munich, you don’t have to fear any critical border controls and so this weekend she will meet her peers at the security conference in a fairly relaxed manner – around 50 heads of state and government. As she says, she had “many invitations” for Friday evening, but I chose this one.
This invitation is the “Women 100” dinner in the Charles Hotel, less than a kilometer away from the Siko-Trutzburg Bayerischer Hof, where everyone is fixated on Kamala Harris, Selenskij & Co. And where one woman, all alone, made an admirable appearance that day despite her pain, Yulia Navalnaya, the wife of Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny. The news of his death is a recurring, sad topic of conversation that evening, including at the Charles Hotel.
There are around a hundred influential, highly decorated, some prominent women standing together here – entrepreneurs, Nobel Prize winners, politicians from all over the world – talking animatedly with each other, in the most beautiful ambience at long tables decorated with flowers and over sweet potato ravioli with Perigord truffles.
They are meeting for the third time during Siko at the invitation of four women: Kristina Lunz and Nina Bernarding from the Center for Feminist Foreign Policy and Janina Hell and Felicitas Karrer, the founders of the “Women 100” network, a feminist platform. If you ask around, the invitations to this evening now seem to be almost more popular than the quite impressive Siko dinner in the residence, which host Markus Söder invites you to every year the next day.
SPD politician Sawsan Chebli and CDU Bundestag member Julia Klöckner at the “Women 100” dinner.
(Photo: Robert Haas)
This Friday evening has special impressions overall. It’s about violence against women. It’s about violence that words can inflame. It’s about being careful when dealing with one another, being sensitive when it comes to language and social media. Kristina Lunz and the human rights activist Düzen Tekkal talk about the political campaign they have just started to achieve the Europe-wide standardization of sexual criminal law. The sentence “No means no”, which applies in Germany and stipulates that sex can only take place with mutual consent, must apply across the EU, they demand.
Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Ressa reported in her keynote that she sometimes received 90 hate emails a day. The Filipino author received the 2021 Nobel Prize for her efforts to protect freedom of expression and democracy. The Australian lawyer Tirana Hassan, director of the Human Rights Watch organization, reports on her work and human rights violations from the Middle East, Sudan to Afghanistan.
Green Party leader Ricarda Lang is in talks with Minister Svenja Schulze.
(Photo: Robert Haas)
Listening attentively at the tables: women like Julia Friedlander from the Atlantic Bridge, Holland’s Defense Minister Kajsa Ollongren and Development Minister Svenja Schulze. Josephine Ballon is also there, the director of HateAid, a GmbH that had to be founded to advise those affected by online hate speech. There are many Green Party politicians there, MPs Agnieszka Brugger and Merle Spellerberg, for example, who say that they had to walk past protest gallows in both the old and new federal states and that the citizens’ offices were cordoned off for safety reasons. Green party leader Ricarda Lang arrives at the Charles Hotel a little later and can only nod silently. She was chased by an angry mob at an Ash Wednesday event in Schorndorf.
The menu at the Charles Hotel: Involtini of purple eggplant, sweet potato ravioli and, for dessert, a creation called Biancomangiare.
(Photo: Robert Haas)
The Estonian prime minister, on the other hand, is being persecuted by the Russian authorities over allegations of demolishing Soviet war memorials in her country. Like a tank T-34 with a red star, which was close to the border with Russia. Kaja Kallas smiles at that. But what moves her: How differently female and male heads of government are still judged. When she said after a long day at work that she wanted to go home to her family, she was given the advice: “Never say that. Always say you have another meeting.” Kallas says: “When I brought this up at the next opportunity, the question immediately came: And who will look after the children?”