On Friday evening, Anne Spiegel (Greens) came back to the Mainz state parliament, where she was environment minister in the summer before moving to Berlin as family minister. The reason for her visit was not a pleasant one: it was about her crisis management during the flood disaster, her assessment of the situation, her accessibility. And it was about the question of whether her main concern at the time was to avert damage to herself and her ministry.
In the past few days, SMS protocols had become public, which put a heavy burden on the minister. On the morning of July 15, she wrote to her ministry’s press office: “The blame game could start immediately, we need wording that we warned in good time.” And further: “I trust Roger (Lewentz, Minister of the Interior of Rhineland-Palatinate, editor’s note) to say that the catastrophe could have been prevented or would not have been so bad if we, the Ministry of the Environment, had warned earlier.” The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported.
But before the minister testified before the committee of inquiry, other witnesses first appeared – and they helped to exonerate her. First of all, her former office manager: The image of Anne Spiegel, who is only concerned about her reputation, is “a distorted image”. Then her secretary of state came. He had tried to reach her by phone on the evening of the flood, including after 10:24 p.m. You called him back. Only: This call is not listed in the itemized bills that he submitted to the investigative committee.
And then Anne Spiegel came into the investigative committee just after 9 p.m. How does she remember the days in July?
“Today I would choose a different formulation”
At 4:43 p.m. on July 14, 2021, her ministry sent out a press release. In it, Spiegel is quoted as saying: “We take the situation seriously, even if there is no threat of extreme flooding.” A short time later, your state secretary wrote that the state of affairs in the press release was “outdated” – but the ministry did not correct the press release. The message, said Spiegel on Friday, is not part of the reporting chain. The flood protection reporting chain worked. “Today I would (…) choose a different formulation.”
Anne Spiegel said that early in the evening she had asked several times whether she should go to the north of the country, like the interior minister. Her state secretary advised against it: not her departmental responsibility. Spiegel then made an appointment with her parliamentary group leader and then went to her apartment in Mainz. There she read e-mails until about 2 a.m., she also called the state secretary, the parliamentary group leader, her husband.
Most recently, she also addressed the text messages that burden her. Anne Spiegel said she denied that “at any point in time” she had any other priority than helping people. There were “thousands of pages of communication” from the days that were presented to the investigative committee, she said, and only those would be singled out.