BThe Greens have flapped their wings again. The new family minister will be Lisa Paus, a left-wing finance politician. Numerous names of possible candidates have been discussed in Berlin since Anne Spiegel’s resignation on Monday, but von Paus was not among them. Greens were also surprised on Thursday.
The 53-year-old economist from the Berlin state association is a specialist in financial and economic policy. She has always been a proponent of the wealth tax. In the past legislative period, she sat on the Wirecard investigative committee and sharply criticized Olaf Scholz in his position as finance minister at the time. Up until now, the single mother of one son only had anything to do with family policy when it came to financing issues. For example, she worked on the green concept of basic child security, which costs billions, which the traffic light wrote in the coalition agreement.
Ricarda Lang, the party leader, said on Monday that “competence” was the key criterion for the new appointment. Realos in particular had demanded that the Greens not get tangled up in multiple quotas again, but rather overcome the wing arithmetic. Last November, the Realos and the Left argued about the composition of the cabinet, the Left insisted on Anton Hofreiter, the Realos on Cem Özdemir. It was a grueling process that ended with a compromise that also included Anne Spiegel, the Rhineland-Palatinate Minister for the Environment and Family at the time.
Realos now argued that the same mistake should not be repeated, pointing out that the left wing’s personnel decisions had recently been rather unfortunate. But the left didn’t want to accept that. It is already difficult for them to bear that there is a left-wing majority in the Bundestag, but the four most popular Greens are Realos.
It was particularly important to the party leadership to find a solution quickly. Important state elections are scheduled for May. Above all, they wanted to avoid the impression that Greens were primarily concerned with themselves, despite the war in Ukraine and the pandemic. Lisa Paus will not have been the preferred candidate of Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck and Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock. She stands inside the left wing, far left. But apparently it was important to both of them to placate the left wing, which they expect a lot from with arms deliveries and an energy partnership with Qatar. At the Berlin state party conference, the Greens from Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg had called for the 100 billion project for the Bundeswehr to be rejected. Paus had warned that this was de facto a breach of the coalition, which in any case led the majority of Green members to support the rearmament goals.
Paus has been a member of the Bundestag since 2009. In the federal elections in the fall, she ran as the top candidate for the Berlin Greens, but in her Berlin-Charlottenburg constituency she was defeated in the direct election by Michael Müller, the former mayor of Berlin. In 1995 Paus became a member of the Greens, moved into the Berlin House of Representatives in 1999 and worked there on economic and financial policy issues.