Roland Wöller is said to have refused his resignation until the end. And so it was up to Michael Kretschmer (CDU) to dismiss Saxony’s interior minister. A “new start in terms of personnel” is needed, said the Prime Minister at a press conference. It’s about new and fresh ideas, but above all about gaining “broader trust”. In the past few weeks, the Christian Democrat Wöller has not only gambled away this trust with the Green and Red coalition partners – but also with his own people.
“The fish stinks from the head” – the two major police unions used harsh words to demand Wöller’s resignation. The reason was his personnel policy in the Ministry of the Interior. Wöller replaced the experienced head of the police communications center with the former state chairman of the Junge Union. He brought little knowledge for the job, but was considered Wöller’s confidante. The staff council got involved; finally it came out that a former friend of Wöller’s wife’s from college was to run the police academy in Rothenburg in the future.
The Minister of the Interior brusquely blocked criticism or even just concerns about this castling again and again. To the end, Wöller acted like a man who believes he can do anything. After all, he’d gotten away with that attitude for years.
The Minister of the Interior started in 2017 with the aim of improving the reputation of the Saxon police – and then had to do with scandals. There was the LKA employee who mobbed journalists at a Pegida demonstration. There were the riots in Chemnitz, encouraged by an understaffed police force. There was the data affair at the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the ammunition scandal at an elite unit and a few more incidents. Wöller fired and transferred, but new problems kept popping up without the interior minister giving up his stubbornness.
Wöller knew about the ski holiday scandal – and said nothing
Wöller’s appearance at a press conference in November 2020 is legendary after riots had broken out at a lateral thinker demonstration the day before. Participants had broken through police chains, the officers had literally fled. Wöller castigated critical reactions to the actions of the police as “absurd and irrelevant”, he praised the officials and then came to speak of the clashes in the left-wing alternative district of Connewitz. Questions by journalists were not allowed.
In other federal states, too, security authorities had underestimated the willingness of some demonstrators to use violence, but in Saxony in particular it seemed as if the police did not want to learn anything. Suddenly Wöller, who had previously always stood in front of the officers, no longer felt responsible. Anyone who asked him why the police were running unauthorized demonstrations by corona deniers and opponents of compulsory vaccination was referred to the respective police department.
With his poor communication and lack of self-criticism, Wöller strained the nerves of the coalition partners. The SPD and the Greens had long been in agreement: this Minister of the Interior has to go. And even with Michael Kretschmer, on whose protection Wöller had relied for years, the pain threshold seemed to have been reached earlier this week when it emerged that an elite police unit had bought himself a skiing holiday at taxpayer expense. The interior minister had apparently known about the scandal for months, but had not informed the interior committee.
Armin Schuster is now to follow Wöller. The 60-year-old comes from the Federal Police, but has also sat in the Bundestag for the CDU. Previously he was President of the Federal Office for Civil Protection and Disaster Assistance in Bonn. His task will be to gain the trust of the police and at the same time to break down the esprit de corps that apparently prevails in parts of the force. It won’t be easy.