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Culture war in Germany: former COVID-era minister of health Jens Spahn has finally resigned as the leader of the parliamentary group of the conservative CDU/CSU.
Spahn (born 1980) got elected to the Bundestag in 2002 and served as a backbencher. He came out as gay in 2012, some 11 years after Wowereit had firmly established that gay politicians were a thing in Germany.
Under Merkel IV, he became minister of health. I surmise the reasoning was that he was a loyal party member and the health ministry was not particularly important, so the damage he could do there was limited.
Then, COVID hit, and health policy became kinda important. Oops.
I will credit that he was no RFK Jr, but mostly did what the experts recommended (whatever you think of that), apart from having meetings with donors when he had just warned against gatherings (like many other politicians did).
But he certainly saw an opportunity for grift and took it. This was the so-called Maskenaffäre. In the summer of 2020, it became increasingly clear that COVID-19 was airborne and particle filter masks (US: N95, EU: FFP2) would offer some protection. This lead to a dearth of protective masks in Europe. So Spahn funneled money taxpayer money to entrepreneurs with close ties to the CDU/CSU to procure such masks.
Now, it was obviously reasonably for the ministry of health to acquire some face masks even at inflated prices common for medical equipment -- at least for people working in hospitals, but he overestimated the amount required by orders of magnitude. Per WP, he bought 5.8 billion masks for an average price of about an Euro per mask. That is 70 masks per person in Germany, most of which were later destroyed when they expired.
As someone very willing to wear masks when recommended (at least until I got multiple doses of the vaccine), I estimate I went through perhaps 10 or 15 masks in total. While there was a supply shortage at a time, it only lasted a few months before Chinese masks flooded the market. The average price I paid in retail was certainly less than a Euro.
The Maskenaffäre cemented the image of the CDU/CSU as a hive of grifters, but despite them losing a few regional elections, it did not lead to Spahn getting driven out of politics. He did lose his ministry to Karl Lauterbach (SPD, physician, COVID hawk) and did not manage to become the heir of Merkel.
In 2025, he became the leader of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group, which is probably not in the top 5 jobs in political Berlin but likely in the top 20.
That is all just background info, not while he was now resigning.
The CDU/CSU has always been a force of social conservatism. Merz famously voted against criminalizing marital rape in 1997. The CDU was not the only party to represent the interests of the industry (the FDP also existed), but it was (for a long time) the main party to vote for if you did not like LGBT rights.
It is thanks to Spahn's CDU/CSU that surrogate pregnancy remains illegal in Germany today. So while Spahn and his husband did not break any German laws when they contracted with a surrogate mother in the US to get a baby, it was generally taken as a defection from the values endorsed by the CDU/CSU and Spahn personally.
Another casualty of Spahn's retreat is the satire news website der Postillon, which in the past years published dozens of articles on Jens Spahn based on his mask procurement which depicted him as both clueless and corrupt. Semiconductor crisis over: Spahn buys chips for more than 3 billion euros was a rather representative example. After he resigned, over 700 employees specializing in such articles reportedly did lose their livelihood.
Isn't CDU a not particularly ideological establishment party? I know that they are socially conservative by name, but my impression was that they had a knack for sitting just to the right of the median voter in Germany on social issues, wherever that happens to be.
I don't know if surrogacy would be particularly more popular on the Left in Germany; in fact if I had to make a blind guess I would imagine the FDP to be the party whose electorate is most okay with it, since it really registers as more of a "affluent people defying nature and propriety" vibe than anything with obvious left/right implications. If the CDU makes it a right-wing thing, they are just rationalising their impulses using whatever their chosen branding is.
I know there are societies where opposing surrogacy is more of a feminist thing than a socially conservative thing, but it's rarely more popular on the center right than the center left.
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