Dhe Federal Department of Health is one big machine that produces many laws and regulations, an apparatus that affects everyone in the country and therefore makes its chief engineer well-known and often even liked. But sometimes he gets caught under the rapidly turning wheels. Health Minister Jens Spahn (CDU) felt this, who initially rose to become a particularly valued politician in the corona pandemic, but then suddenly fell. Now this decline is happening to his successor Karl Lauterbach (SPD). After almost a year in office, not everything he has tackled is bad, but the high hopes that were placed in him and which he himself nurtured have largely been dashed.
Immediately after being sworn in in December, Lauterbach ranked third among the most popular politicians behind Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD), and in January he was even at the top. The minister has now slipped to seventh or tenth place. When he was not yet sitting at the cabinet table, his support from the population was particularly strong, the hashtag #wirwollenkarl was circulating.
Scholz also took off when he presented his SPD ministers to Nikolaus last year. In the fight against the pandemic, “most of the citizens would have wished that the next federal health minister was a specialist and that his name was Karl Lauterbach,” said Scholz at the time. “He will.” The sentence was significant, because in fact the public had heaved the fifty-eight-year-old to his post rather than his own party. To this day, Lauterbach enjoys less support in the SPD than the other ministers. He is seen as a loner, not particularly a team player and at times precocious.
Lots of political experience
The early praise referred to Lauterbach’s supposedly stringent approaches in the fight against Covid-19. He tirelessly tweeted during Spahn’s tenure, attended talk shows, had himself interviewed and had already blossomed into a kind of shadow minister, even though he himself belonged to the government camp. That not only annoyed Spahn, but also many social democrats, especially their health politicians. After all, Lauterbach was no longer even a spokesman for health policy, let alone deputy in his parliamentary group.
However, he felt he had to get involved because he had plenty of specialist political experience and also expertise as a doctor, researcher and health economist. Since his time in America, he has prided himself on his international network. He was a member of the Council of Experts in Health Care and later became a member of the “Rürup Commission”. In the first decade of the 2000s, he was seen as the “whisperer” of Ulla Schmidt (SPD), the Federal Minister of Health with the longest service.
To this day, Lauterbach teaches at Harvard as an associate professor and prides himself on being able to have a say in the specialist discussion. His references to current studies that he has just read, often enough at night, have become legendary, which is probably intended to underline his eagerness to work. Alongside the FDP politician Philipp Rösler, who was in office between 2009 and 2011, Lauterbach is the only doctor among the 17 federal health ministers to date. As in other departments, the elected officials often get their posts out of party reasons or proportional representation rather than on the basis of professional qualifications.
#Minister #Health #Lauterbach #fallen #professor