Status: 06.12.2021 10:30 a.m.
Karl Lauterbach becomes Federal Minister of Health in the new traffic light government. The other ministers of the SPD have also been chosen. The Ministry of the Interior is occupied by a woman for the first time.
Karl Lauterbach is to become Federal Minister of Health. This is what the nominee Chancellor Olaf Scholz proposes for the Social Democrats. Lauterbach is one of the most renowned health experts in his party, but there were also reservations about him in the SPD. In the middle of the high phase of the fourth corona wave, he will take over the office from the outgoing incumbent Jens Spahn.
The current Minister of Justice, Christine Lambrecht, is to become the Minister of Defense. The first female interior minister becomes the Hessian SPD leader Nancy Faeser. Hubertus Heil remains Minister of Labor. The Federal Minister for Building and Housing is to be the Potsdam-based Klara Geywitz, with whom Scholz had applied unsuccessfully for the party chairmanship two years ago. The previous Federal Environment Minister Svenja Schulze takes over the development aid ministry. Wolfgang Schmidt is to become the minister of the Chancellery.
More men than women in the new federal government
As the last of the three parties in the planned Ampel coalition, the SPD named its ministers. The new federal cabinet is to be sworn in after the election of the new federal chancellor, which is planned for Wednesday.
With Scholz as head of government, the cabinet will then have nine men and eight women. The FDP has already nominated three men and one woman for the government, the Greens three women and two men. Scholz emphasized in the presentation that it corresponds to “the society in which we live” that women get half the power.
He is “very proud” to realize that. Scholz had announced a federal government with equal representation long before the general election. “A cabinet that I run as Chancellor is at least half of the women,” he tweeted a year ago.