Spahn’s star wanes as German corona frustration grows

The start of Germany’s rollout of coronavirus vaccines after Christmas capped a breakout year for Health Minister Jens Spahn.

Often dismissed as too young, too ambitious and too inexperienced, Spahn appeared to have proved his critics wrong through deft handling of the pandemic. By the end of 2020, Spahn had become so popular (his ratings were second only to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s) that he quietly put out feelers to fellow conservatives about whether he should make a run for the chancellery.

Three months and a long series of missteps later, Germany’s conservatives are contemplating a much different question: whether Spahn should be fired.

The 40-year-old politician’s Icarian journey of recent months reflects the deep frustration, if not betrayal, that many Germans feel over their government’s recent handling of the pandemic, in particular what they see as a bungled effort to quickly vaccinate the population.

Nearly 60 percent of Germans are dissatisfied with the job Spahn has done, according to a poll published this month by Der Spiegel. In the meantime, public approval of the government’s pandemic management sank to its lowest point on record in early March.

Things got worse last Monday, when Spahn announced that Germany would suspend using the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine, a move guaranteed to further slow the pace of vaccinations. Spahn insisted he was only following the advice of the country’s vaccine regulators, but many Germans, already seething over the government’s recent flip-flop on the vaccine for people over 65, didn’t care. Their anger only grew after a number of experts characterized the scientific basis for halting the immunizations as extremely thin.

“There are only a few months left before the national election, but replacing Spahn as health minister would help build new trust in the state among the population,” Wolfgang Kubicki, deputy leader of the opposition Free Democratic Party, said on Wednesday.

Spahn claimed Thursday’s updated advice from the EU’s medicines regulator — that it considered the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine to be safe but couldn’t eliminate a possible link to a rare type of blood clot — was confirmation that his caution earlier in the week had been justified.

“EMA’s analysis vindicates the course we’ve taken,” he said Thursday evening. “It was right to suspend the AstraZeneca vaccination as a precautionary measure until this conspicuous cluster of rare blood clots could be analyzed.”

Even so, Kubicki’s call for the minister’s removal, which was echoed by other prominent opposition politicians, illustrated just how swift Spahn‘s reversal of fortune has been. Only last month, Kubicki praised Spahn for his “stamina” during a parliamentary hearing after MPs grilled the minister in a lengthy session.

Spahn’s streak of bad press shows no sign of letting up. On Sunday, Spiegel reported that German publisher Burda, where Spahn’s husband works as a lobbyist, sold 570,000 masks to the health ministry last spring in a deal arranged between Spahn and the company’s CEO. Spahn’s husband, Daniel Funke, wasn’t involved in the deal and didn’t know about it, a company spokesman told the magazine.

Conservative favorite

Young and conservative, Spahn, who became health minister in 2018 when he was only 37, quickly developed into the darling of those in Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) who have been unhappy with the chancellor’s centrist course.

After he joined the CDU’s youth wing, the Junge Union, in 1995, Spahn steadily worked his way to the top of the party. He first became a member of parliament in 2002 and chair of his local CDU group in 2005. He started working on health policy and later became chairman of the Bundestag’s health committee.

Spahn was elected a member of the CDU executive committee in 2014 and soon thereafter was appointed state secretary at the finance ministry under CDU veteran Wolfgang Schäuble. When Merkel began her fourth term as chancellor in 2018, Spahn was finally picked as health minister, a post he had long dreamed of filling.

But even at that time, there was a lot of speculation in Berlin that Spahn would not settle for less than the chancellery in the medium term. Though Spahn lost a bid for the CDU leadership in 2018, his campaign established him as a man of the future.

In that respect, the pandemic seemed to be the perfect opportunity for Spahn to prove his mettle. For months, he was on television almost daily, boosting his profile among regular Germans and earning their trust.

“Let’s stay vigilant, let’s abide by the rules … I’m also sometimes annoyed by wearing a face mask,” Spahn said over the summer, cultivating his image as a successful, cautious and understanding health minister.

In June, Spahn bragged about Germany’s coronavirus tracking app on Twitter, countering British Prime Minster Boris Johnson for saying no country had managed to successfully implement the technology. In Spahn’s mind, Germany had.

But as with much else regarding Germany’s response to the pandemic, Spahn’s optimism turned out to be misplaced.

Headwind for poster child

Nine months later, nobody in the U.K. is talking about apps as the country is too busy managing its successful vaccine rollout, which has turned into a daily reminder for Germans of how fast immunization could have progressed if EU and German authorities had handled things differently.

Meanwhile, Germany, having long ago given up on tracing, is suffocating under a seemingly endless string of lockdowns with no end in sight.

The slow vaccine rollout is only one of Spahn’s problems. He recently had to go back on his word to quickly introduce free rapid coronavirus tests after Merkel halted the plan, saying it required more discussion. The rapid tests, which Spahn sees as a way to mitigate the effect of the slow progress in vaccination, might have helped the government’s battered image, but instead the incident has only reinforced doubts about the minister’s stewardship.

The Social Democrats, the Christian Democrats’ junior partner in the governing coalition, have joined the pile-on. Rolf Mützenich, leader of the Social Democrats’ group in parliament, called Spahn an “announcement minister” last month, slamming him for making empty promises.

Spahn’s personal behavior during the pandemic has also recently come under scrutiny. Last summer, he and his husband purchased a historic villa in Berlin’s leafy Dahlem district, for more than €4 million. The eye-popping price, which Spahn tried and failed to keep the media from reporting, wasn’t the only detail that raised eyebrows. A small savings bank in Spahn’s constituency, where he was once a board member, financed most of the purchase, according to German media. There’s no indication that Spahn broke any rules or laws in connection with the purchase. Nonetheless, the optics of the deal, which comes amid a broader discussion in Germany over backroom influence peddling by Christian Democrats, have further tarnished Spahn’s image.

Spahn’s participation in a private fundraising dinner in the fall, one day before he tested positive for the coronavirus, hasn’t helped matters either. At the time of the gathering, the minister regularly appealed to citizens to follow pandemic precautions, which include advice to avoid dinner parties. What made the event look even worse was that Spahn reportedly told attendees to limit donations to just below €10,000 in order to avoid triggering a public disclosure requirement. While politicians across Europe have been caught out in recent months for violating the very pandemic restrictions they propagate in public, such behavior by a health minister is particularly damaging.

“The event at that time was in accordance with corona rules,” Spahn insisted after the reports came out, pointing out that it hadn’t infected anyone.

Indeed, the only real victim of the foray was Spahn’s political standing.

This article has been updated.

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