When Uwe Becker (CDU) had his letter sent to the “dear city councilors” on Tuesday, in which he thanked his colleagues and criticized the new coalition, he was in Israel.

There, on behalf of the city of Frankfurt, he brought Tel Aviv's Lord Mayor Ron Huldai funding for Holocaust survivors.

The task matched his voluntary work: the mayor and city treasurer is also the anti-Semitism officer of the Hessian state government.

Political appointments will continue to be made, also in the future - because at least this office will remain with the 51-year-old politician, who has been a department head and therefore a full-time member of the magistrate for 15 years.

Martin Benninghoff

Editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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First he was responsible for social affairs, then for a long time finances and churches.

But the full-time city politics will soon be over.

“A cocktail of feelings,” he says, “a mixture of gratitude and humility” drives him.

His first recall is due this Thursday, as it is called according to the Hessian Municipal Code (HGO).

The majority of the new coalition of the Greens, SPD, FDP and Volt and probably other city councilors, the three CDU department heads - besides Becker, Jan Schneider and Daniela Birkenfeld - as well as SPD transport department head Klaus Oesterling, who will no longer belong to the new magistrate, will be recalled .

This requires an absolute, but not a two-thirds majority, within six months of the local elections.

With 93 city councilors in Frankfurt that is 47 votes.

Double bottom

Markus Frank (CDU), head of the economic department, did not allow himself to be re-elected last year, so his dismissal is not necessary.

According to the HGO, a second decision is planned at least four weeks apart, which will take place on September 8th.

A decision with a double bottom, so to speak.

Only at the end of this day does the term of office of the city council end and the new department heads can be elected.

For the CDU, which is now the largest faction in the Römer outside the coalition, it has to be: switch to the opposition.

She has to get used to that too.

In addition to all politics: There are also personal cuts and unfamiliar situations, especially since the city councils are supposed to leave the hall for reasons of bias before the debate in the city council on Thursday.

Schneider and Birkenfeld are calm to the outside world.

"For me, the dismissal is now the logical step," says the 40-year-old Schneider, who is district chairman of the CDU.

He has been a department head since 2013, first for reform projects, then also for construction, real estate, citizen service and IT.

His 61-year-old colleague, Daniela Birkenfeld, has been the department head for social affairs since 2007.

She says she is calm, especially since a city councilor is “only elected for a certain period of time”.

She can imagine going back to college; between 1991 and 2007 she taught administrative law.

No financial worries

For the time being, the retired city councils don't have to worry financially.

For incumbent department heads, the salary group B8 amounts to 134,430.12 euros per year, according to the city; after being dismissed, they receive 94,304.16 euros per year until the end of their electoral term.

Becker is elected until 2022, Schneider and Birkenfeld are elected until 2025, whereby the social department head points out that their salaries in approximately the same amount are due anyway due to their decades of employment in the administration.

But politics is always about power and the decline of power - and about nicknames and jealousies.

In the debate on Thursday, city councilors should therefore address some of the past.

"I hope that it will be a somewhat conciliatory debate," said the new leader of the FDP parliamentary group, Yanki Pürsün.

Becker, in turn, would like that too, although in his letter he did not skimp on critical tones in the direction of the new coalition: "Your task is not your own self-realization in the magistrate," he wrote.

Some will understand the criticism as presumptuousness and an order for a return coach on Thursday.