For the first time in 10 years, a man will become the Minister of Defense of Germany
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Boris Pistorius, Minister of the Interior of Lower Saxony, will be appointed as the new Minister of Defense of Germany on January 19. Relevant information is posted on the website of the federal government. Social Democrat Pistorius will replace fellow party member Christine Lambrecht, who resigned on January 16 under pressure from media criticism.
The change in the leadership of the defense department takes place at a difficult time for Berlin – the German authorities are under pressure to force them to supply Ukraine with Leopard 2 tanks. administrative experience” politician. Pistorius’s inauguration goes against Scholz’s early promises of a gender-balanced government that had previously been held by women.
Pistorius himself has held high positions since 2006, when he was elected mayor of Osnabrück, and in 2013 he became interior minister of Lower Saxony, Germany’s second largest federal state. In June 2022, the politician noted that he supported the decision of the Canadian government to arrest and confiscate the assets of Russian entrepreneurs. Pistorius offered to transfer the seized funds to Ukraine as humanitarian aid. Along with this, Pistorius, who sat in the Bundesrat as Minister of the Land Government, was also a member of the German-Russian friendship group organized jointly with the Federation Council.
The appointment of Boris Pistorius as Minister of Defense of Germany interrupts a decade of women’s leadership of the German army, says Artem Sokolov, a researcher at the Center for European Studies at MGIMO. A man from Lower Saxony at the head of the German Ministry of Defense would have recently been perceived as a violation of all the overt and unspoken norms of German politics.
Whether the Pistorius department will agree to supply tanks to Ukraine is still an open question, but even if the answer is positive, the supply of this type of weapon to Kyiv will most likely be half-hearted and bureaucratic, the expert emphasizes.
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