SMS messages sent and received by Anne Spiegel have surfaced over the past few days, and none of the messages reflects well on her. They suggest that after the flood disaster on the Ahr in 2021 – at that time she was Environment Minister in Mainz – Spiegel was primarily concerned about her reputation. “The blame game could start immediately, we need wording that we warned in good time,” she wrote to her spokesman the day after the flood.
Late on Friday evening, today’s Federal Family Minister (Greens) was heard before the investigative committee of the Mainz state parliament and of course she tried to defend herself. But she only managed that to a limited extent.
In the days after the flood, Spiegel said, she wrote a large number of e-mails, Threema messages and text messages, which “represented only an excerpt”. That’s certainly true – but it doesn’t make her any less unhappy. Especially since an employee wrote to her a short time later: “What we really need now is a wording.” And further: “Have we done everything, did we warn in time? It has to make an impression to ward off attacks.” With each sentence, the section gets a little bit bigger.
It is also unclear to what extent Spiegel had contact with employees on the evening of the flood, i.e. took care of the situation. The state secretary in the Ministry of the Environment called her at 10:34 p.m. but did not get through, so she called him back. Only: There is no entry in the files of the committee of inquiry. And for the time after that, Anne Spiegel only names two interlocutors, the parliamentary group leader of the Greens in the state parliament and her husband. Spiegel says she went to bed around two o’clock.
“No extreme flood”
And then there’s the press release. Warnings of possible flooding had already been issued days before the flood disaster, and again on the day itself. The Rhineland-Palatinate state environmental authority LfU – which reports to Spiegel’s then ministry – issued a forecast in the afternoon, according to which the level could rise to up to 5.19 meters. At 4:43 p.m., her ministry sent out a message in which she was quoted as saying: “We take the situation seriously, even if there is no threat of extreme flooding.” A short time later, her state secretary described this status as “outdated” – but the ministry did not correct the message.
So early on Saturday morning, one impression remains above all: that Anne Spiegel is lucky. That the Ukraine war overshadows everything, that it’s about the level of the defense budget and gas prices and not about what she wrote or didn’t write as state minister. Because the impression of their crisis management during the flood disaster has not improved significantly.