Anne Spiegel, Germany’s Family Minister, resigned on Monday after facing criticism for taking a summer vacation last year, just after the region where she was the environment minister at the time was flooded to death.
Because of “political pressure,” Spiegel claimed she had decided to resign.
In a statement, she added, “I am doing this to avoid damage to the office, which is facing enormous political issues.”
When her environmentalist Green party entered a new coalition government led by Chancellor Olaf Scholz of the Social Democrats in December, the 41-year-old took on the family portfolio.
Spiegel’s retirement follows an emotional message on Sunday in which she apologized for taking her family on a four-week vacation to France last July.
She traveled for vacation 10 days after devastating floods ravaged the western Rhineland-Palatinate and North Rhine-Westphalia districts, killing over 180 people.
Spiegel was Rhineland-environment Palatinate’s minister at the time. The vacation was just recently reported in the media.
A emotional Spiegel defended the trip, claiming that her husband had suffered a stroke in 2019 and needed to avoid stress, and that the epidemic and her own workload had put a strain on their four young children.
On Sunday, she stated, “I decided I had to be there for my family.”
Spiegel went on to say that she had worked extensively in the days before up to her trip to assist the impacted communities, and that she was approachable throughout her vacation.
She also took a one-day journey to the hard-hit Ahr valley during her stay in France.
Despite what she had previously stated, Spiegel admitted that she did not attend cabinet sessions while on vacation.
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Spiegel’s removal has been demanded by opposition leaders. Friedrich Merz, the head of the centre-right CDU, accused Spiegel of being more concerned with her “holiday and her own image than the destiny of people in the Ahr region.”
Chancellor Scholz stated that he had “great respect” for Spiegel’s choice to leave and that her personal statement had “moved” him.
Spiegel’s departure, according to Green Party Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, demonstrated “how harsh politics can be.”
She went on to say that Germany was “losing an extraordinarily outstanding family minister” who was committed to ending child poverty.
Ursula Heinen-Esser, the environment minister of North Rhine-Westphalia, resigned last week after it was revealed she had celebrated her husband’s birthday in Mallorca just days after the floods.
The two resignations come amid widespread public dissatisfaction with Germany’s handling of the floods.
The floods were not only the deadliest in modern American history, but they also devastated roads, bridges, and thousands of houses and businesses. The massive rehabilitation project is still underway.
Despite weather services predicted severe rains, the severity of the disaster has been blamed in part on a lack of warnings to locals ahead of time.
