In the past two weeks, the eyes of those interested in Frankfurt's local politics rested on the FDP, which surprisingly rejected the coalition agreement with the Greens, SPD and Volt on the evening of May 26 and demanded renegotiations, but the Greens were also uneasy internally .
The occasion is the party's women's statute, which the Frankfurt Greens only updated in summer 2018.
Mechthild Harting
Editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.
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The party executive and negotiating committee interpreted the statute in a special way when filling the Green department posts that had been planned so far. Their suggestion was that the Greens should first fill the five full-time departmental positions that had been negotiated with three men and two women. Only after the regular end of the term of office of health officer Stefan Majer (The Greens) in the summer of 2023 should his position be filled with a woman. Majer will then be 65 years old.
The background to this occupation policy was that the party leadership wanted to fill the transport department, which was wrested from the SPD in the negotiations and which was important for the Greens, with an experienced transport politician.
The Greens even have two of them - Wolfgang Siefert and Heiko Nickel, who has recently entered the city parliament - but neither are women.
Conversely, none of the Green politicians are currently pushing for this task.
And so the party leadership came up with the successor solution.
"More than ever the city of women"
With this proposal, the Green party leadership went to the general assembly on May 26th, which ran parallel to that of the FDP. There was a fundamental discussion about the statute and posts. The spokesperson was the former head of the women's department, Sarah Sorge, who accused the party of “reinterpreting” the women's statute, which was something like a “green constitution”. The discussion was broken off without result when it became clear that the FDP had rejected the coalition agreement in the form it had up to then.
If the Frankfurt Greens come together for their next meeting on Monday evening as planned in order to vote on the supplementary "Declaration on the coalition agreement", which has meanwhile been negotiated with the coalition partners, the members will also have a changed personnel table for filling the five city council posts for the full-time magistrate. Because right up to the top of the party, women politicians in the Green Party did not want to expose themselves to the criticism of the grassroots that the Greens, of all people, did not take due account of women's equality. Party spokeswoman Beatrix Baumann had full-bodied announced at the presentation of the coalition agreement that Frankfurt would become “more than ever the city of women”.
Now the plans of the party leadership envisage that the designated head of transport, Wolfgang Siefert, will wait two years before he can take up the city council post. Until then, Stefan Majer will once again be the head of the transport department, but will keep the health department in view of the ongoing pandemic. The social department, which he regards as important and which he would have taken over from the CDU at his own request according to the previous planning, is now to be occupied by a woman.
The party leadership and the negotiating commission could, as has been heard, very well imagine Elke Voitl, who is currently head of Majer's departmental office, at this post.
Voitl had previously headed the office of Education and Women's Affairs Director Sarah Sorge from 2012 to 2016.
After Sorges was voted out of office in 2016, she was in charge of the women department of City Councilor Rosemarie Heilig (The Greens).
The 52-year-old Voitl is a qualified social worker.
Bad mood
But the fact that this personality was apparently only interpreted in the party's leadership circle, without the participation of the parliamentary group, has led to dissatisfaction in the past few days. On the sidelines of the parliamentary group meeting on Wednesday, which took place in attendance, Green city councilors looked beyond the agenda with the personnel and felt it was necessary to bring up a candidate for the city council post: 47-year-old Natascha Kauder.
With one interruption, Kauder has been a member of the city parliament since 2011, initially being a member of the social committee and, in recent years, a member of the environmental and sports committee. After the local elections in March, she moved into eighth place on the city council list in parliament. She has been deputy group leader since mid-May. Kauder is also a qualified social worker, she heads a team in the Offenbach job center.
Majer's decision to take over the traffic department comes as a surprise.
He held the department from 2011 to 2016 and had to surrender it due to the poor result of the Greens in the local elections in 2016 - with a heavy heart, as he has often emphasized.
And so he had presented very emotionally at the meeting on May 26th that he was not ready to continue where he had to abruptly stop everything in 2016.
"Like a chess piece" pushed somewhere
"No, I'm not doing that for the sake of the Greens or Sarah's concern that I'm going to be head of the traffic department again for two years." Because that would mean that as a full-time head of department you would only be pushed somewhere "like a pawn", said he.
That is not compatible with his understanding of office.
According to reports, there has been a strong influence on Majer, so that he is now ready to take over the traffic department again.
As before, Bastian Bergerhoff as treasurer, Nargess Eskandari-Grünberg as integration officer and Rosemarie Heilig are to take on the other department posts at the Greens.
City councilor for women and the environment remains sacred, although the latter is to be expanded strongly in the direction of climate protection.