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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.
This always strikes me as such an odd left-wing shibboleth to throw out. The actual concept of prosecuting marital rape under the law seems like a really nuanced and difficult idea, not one that is easily simplified to "well duh you fucking troglodyte of course this can only go one way."
Yeah, it's annoyed me even when contemporary conservatives and traditionalists defend the concept (I have seen them criticising foreign countries for not criminalising it) - the concept implicity undermines the traditional understanding of marriage.
Marital rape wasn't a crime because in the past it was assumed (required) that marriage came with an obligation to engage in sexual intercourse with your spouse. There's a reason the euphemism "fulfilling the marital obligations" was used in the past. Catholic teaching, still, teaches that spouses shouldn't refuse one another unless there's a genuine reason and the requests themselves are reasonable.
What defendants of the concept of criminalising marital rape will argue that it's basically to stop violent rape with marriage - i.e. a husband physically and violently forcing himself on his wife. That there were a huge epidemic of women who actually being violently raped by their husbands but no one could do anything about it because it was "legal". But the reality was it was and is already a crime in the form of various spouse battery statutes. In practice, marital rape is used to describe any "coercion" a husband uses on his wife to sleep with her. But this creates huge ambiguity - it's expected, traditionally, that the husband and wife would be having sex so any sexual act itself couldn't be considered evidence of coercion. It demonises normal sexual marital expectations.
The concept of marital rape itself is a good example of how liberal presuppositions have become omnipresent in even our closest relationships. Marital rape as a distinct concept from domestic violence only makes sense where marriage is merely a sexless economic contract between cohabitors that can be broken at any time, and not a union of two bodies and souls.
There are striking parallels to the introduction of no-fault divorce.
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