Britta Ernst, Scholz’s wife resigns as Minister of Education of Brandenburg: among her critics also the SPD

Britta ErnstSocial Democratic Minister of Education of the Brandenburg and wife of the Chancellor Olaf Scholzpresented the resignation. In a short press conference a Potsdam the German “first lady” traced the reasons for her step back to the lack of support – even of the Spd – to the challenges on the agenda for his dicastery for which “one great decision” which he considered “to have failed”. In a written statement he defended his work by indicating that “many good and important decisions have been made in the past and current legislatures to guarantee lessons”.

Ernst had been much criticized in recent years, as the news agencies explain Dpa e France Pressnot just from associations ed oppositions, but also from the ranks of the government coalition which since autumn 2019 has been made up of the SPD, CDU and the Greens. Social Democrats and environmentalists had also censured his plan to replace 200 seats full time for teachers in assignments for administrative forces e social workers school. The plan would have reduced resources for additional offers such as supportive, full-time and inclusion classes as part of responding to teacher shortages. The plan should have been used to recover staff for normal teaching. The Governor of the Land Dietmar Woidke he thanked Ernst, who – he underlined – honored his work in difficult times such as the pandemic “with foresight and a calm hand”.

The Scholz couple had met while studying ad Hamburg where they married in 1998, but despite the militancy in the same party they have always maintained professional distance. From 1997 to 2011 Britta Ernst was a member of parliament of the former Hanseatic city, but when Scholz became mayor of the port city she left regional politics and became involved in the state-regions coordination office of the parliamentary group of the SPD in Berlin. In 2014 she became Minister of Vocational Education of the Schleswig-Holstein an armchair that she lost with the defeat of the SPD in 2017. In September of the same year, however, she was called back to hold the same position in Brandenburg at the call of Woidke himself.

In an interview with the women’s weekly Brigitte in July 2021 Scholz was asked whether – in the event of appointment as head of government – ​​his wife would not simply have been the first lady. Scholz replied curtly, highlighting his wife’s political commitment: “It’s a question that indignates me: I don’t know if it would also be asked of men who were spouses (ed., of a chancellor)”. During the race for the chancellorship, the SPD leader later confided that he was a better man thanks to the wife and to have discovered the jogging twenty years earlier thanks to him. However, Britta Ernst has always run alone politically, ending up finding herself against her own party.