It?s problably the jeans. Or the red hair, which always looks like some friend cut it at her kitchen table. However you look at it, Ilka Schröder stands out among the other members of the European Parliament in Strasbourg. At 23, she is not only the youngest politician that Germany has ever sent to the parliament that rules the European Union. She is the youngest European politician of all time. Schröder had barely reached the American legal drinking age when in 1999 she convinced her party, the Greens, that she was the right person to fight for green issues in Strasbourg and Brussels. »Let the old guys take care of Germany!« she told her colleagues. »The European Union is the future, so young people should deal with it.« The »old guys« were impressed and endorsed her candidacy.
In theory, the former economics ma-jor, who dropped out of university to take the job at the European Parliament, embodies all the ideals of the German Greens: she is young, smart, unconventional, and utterly devoted to the Green goals of peace, people participation, and the environment. Her tough political stance, however, often brings her into conflict with her own party. She even called German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, who is a fellow Green, a warmonger for supporting a German military presence in Kosovo. Although older Green leaders have threatened to kick her out for such antics, Schröder sees no reason to change. »Politics has nothing to do with pleasing the party,« she says. »It?s about doing good things!« The German Greens could have known that Schröder would not sit quietly.
As a member of her high school environment club in Berlin, she once tore up the concrete schoolyard in order to plant flowers. At 15, she co-founded the national Green-Alternative Youth Alliance, a youth organisation affiliated with the Greens. Even though she now earns about 13,000 DM ($6,500) a month, Schröder still shares a crowded Berlin apartment with eight other students, preferring to fund political activism and demonstrations. She?s also been known to bail people out of jail if they get arrested during a political protest. »You?ve got to take politics out to the street, to the people!« she says.
Although Ilka Schröder has no idea what she will be doing after her five-year term in Parliament is over, one thing is absolutely certain: »Politics, in the sense of fighting for your ideas at various levels, is an important part of my life,« she says. »And I?ll definitely continue doing this for a long time.«
Sophie Podeus
http:/www.ilka.org/
