BERLIN/NUREMBERG (dpa-AFX) – Federal Minister of Economics Robert Habeck is sticking with his State Secretary Patrick Graichen. In this context, Habeck called the re-advertising of the chief post of the German Energy Agency (Dena) the correction of an error. “The substance of the error could still be corrected, namely a new tender,” said the Green politician on Saturday in Deutschlandfunk’s “Interview of the Week”. CSU leader Markus Söder called for Graichen’s dismissal at a party conference.
Graichen has come under pressure because he was involved in the selection of Dena’s new managing director, Michael Schäfer, even though he is his best man. On Friday, the Dena supervisory board decided to re-advertise the chief post of the federal company.
In the political sphere, it is not often that mistakes are proactively acknowledged. “But that’s what I want, that’s what I ask of my people and also of myself,” Habeck said on Deutschlandfunk. If the error can be corrected, it must be done.
In the “Welt am Sonntag” Habeck praised Graichen’s energy. “Patrick is a robust politician and with his consistent manner he has taken care of averting an economic crisis and gas shortages, filling gas storage facilities, building LNG terminals, connecting coal-fired power plants and extending nuclear power plants,” he said.
“Habeck must dismiss Graichen,” demanded CSU party leader Söder on Saturday at a CSU party conference in Nuremberg. Otherwise the Graichen affair would be a Habeck affair. Söder criticized the personnel policy of the Ministry of Economic Affairs as a whole. “The whole green clan is somehow occupied there,” he said, “brother, sister, uncle, aunt.” And if you keep looking, you’re sure to find some Schwippschwager. “This is nothing more than green corruption,” criticized Söder. Should anyone from the Greens accuse the CSU of felting again, then he would call out to them: “Solve your own problems.”
Green Party leader Ricarda Lang sharply rejected the allegations of nepotism. Mistakes happened and they were clearly acknowledged, Lang said on Sunday evening in the ARD program “Report from Berlin”. The Greens are also happy to accept criticism. “But if that comes loudest from the CSU and Markus Söder, among others, the one with the amigo affair, who made nepotism into a kind of working model with the mask affair, then you have to honestly say that there is an accusation of double standards also more projection.”
Among other things, Lang referred to the mask affair in which members of the Bundestag and state parliament from the CDU and CSU were involved. During the corona pandemic, they received a lot of money for arranging protective masks.
Your co-chairman Omid Nouripour warned on Sunday evening in the ZDF program “Berlin direct” that you have to be precise about what the allegations are about. The selection of the Dena managing director was a mistake, but: “We are not talking about systematic networks as we know them from the mask affair, as we know them from the Moscow connection,” said the Green politician./ctt/had /dm/csd/DP/mis