Ahead of the 1994 elections, SPD chairman Rudolf Scharping included her in his shadow cabinet for the party’s campaign to unseat incumbent Helmut Kohl as Chancellor.

[citation needed] In 1999, both Däubler-Gmelin and Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer appealed for clemency for the LaGrand brothers, two German citizens sentenced to death in Arizona.

[3] On 18 September 2002, four days before Schröder's re-election, she attended a meeting at a restaurant in Derendingen (near Tübingen) with about 30 trade unionists from two local factories (the topic was "Globalization and Labor").

[4] Däubler-Gmelin, who has long been known for her outspokenness,[5] later said she had been unaware that a reporter from local newspaper Schwäbisches Tagblatt was present, insisting that she regarded the event as an internal meeting.

[4] When some participants showed disagreement, she added immediately that this was not meant to liken Bush to Hitler as a person, but rather to compare their methods, and that British prime minister Margaret Thatcher had also used the 1982 Falklands War to improve election prospects.

[4] This was the version published by Schwäbisches Tagblatt (a paper widely regarded as liberal to leftist and respected for its journalistic quality), which later stated that Däubler-Gmelin herself had confirmed the wording of the report,[5][6] as well as several present at the meeting.

She encountered criticism for allegedly expressing anti-americanism in both Germany and abroad, including members of the U.S. government such as Ari Fleischer and Condoleezza Rice.

[15] In 2019, Däubler-Gmelin was appointed to a task force investigating allegations of fraud and embezzlement at Workers' Welfare Association (AWO), a charity and one of Germany’s largest employers.