Two high profile ministers quits their posts yesterday (9 January) despite initially being backed by chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, a move apparently designed to overcome what local papers are calling a “government crisis” over BSE.
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Consumer, media and opposition accusations of complacency over mad cow disease and its human brain wasting equivalent vCJD had been levelled at health minister Andrea Fischer and agriculture minister Karl-Heinz Funke for some time, but their sudden departure has left Schroeder under pressure to find replacements and under scrutiny for his own judgement.
The woman tipped to take over the sensitive post is Baerbel Hoehn, Green Party environment minister from North Rhine-Westphalia and apt signifier of Schroeder’s tough new line against the spread of BSE. She is well known opponent of lifting the beef ban, creating a further stumbling block for British farmers.
Ever since the BSE crisis erupted during the 1980s, the official line in Germany, headed by Funke, has been that the country is entirely free from mad cow disease. Since testing began last autumn, however, 10 cases have been discovered in homegrown cattle, proving a huge shock to a nation supremely confident in the safety of its meat.
In Brussels, the European commission criticised Schroeder’s government for failing to take strong measures when the BSE crisis broke, and Fischer admitted, “the confidence of German citizens in the government’s ability to solve the [BSE] crisis has been shaken.”
During an all-day emergency parliamentary committee meeting the two ministers at the heart of the crisis and German BSE policy, Fischer and Funke, faced accusations that they knew full well at the beginning of 2000 about the lack of guarantees over the safety of German beef.
Fischer had been slammed for her u-turn over a recall of sausages containing meat that had been mechanically retrieved. She also admitted that she ignored a warning issued by government experts over practices in the sausage industry for 10 days. At the meeting she proposed a reduction in the age of cattle screened for BSE to below 30 months and Funke proposed plans for a tighter food safety inspection procedure.
Just two days after the meeting however, a live broadcast on German television saw Fischer saying that she had offered her resignation to Schroeder in the hope that that “I can contribute to an end of the revelations and help promote a return to business as usual,” and that he had accepted.
The terse statement also issued by Shroeder left many wondering if it had been purely a case of individual initiative in the offering of resignations, or if the chancellor had suggested the move.
Schroeder is now expected to present a renewed cabinet in his centre-left government, with a refreshed food safety strategy, by tonight (10 January) after talks between representatives of the two coalition parties in Berlin.
The cabinet reshuffle may well be engineered to inspire public confidence in a coalition government once riding high in opinion polls but now tarred by several high-profile ministers. As well as Fischer and Funke, three senior politicians have been reproved within the last few months. A public display of regained control and a strong new policy on an increasingly political issue such as BSE could be just what Schroeder needs to boost the Social Democrat/Green Party government’s popularity.
