She did. Britta Ernst quits after six years as Minister of Education in Brandenburg. It is obvious that the reasons must be serious if she prefers to devote herself to the unloved voluntary job as Germany’s chancellor’s wife: According to the reasoning, she no longer has any support in her own SPD parliamentary group. In the conflict over a comparatively paltry 200 teaching positions in a billion-euro budget, the largest in the country.
What’s suddenly going on in Brandenburg, where the Social Democrats have so far celebrated unity and have therefore won all state elections since 1990 – and now scare off the chancellor’s wife at the same time?
Centrifugal forces are increasingly reigning in the Mark. The state, politics and the SPD, which presented itself as the “Brandenburg Party”, are drifting apart. And yes, Ernst’s way of decreing politics as a minister did not really make it to the teachers, students and parents in the country. The education system is as bad as ever, and so is the mood.
A Brandenburg? That too has been lost.
And yet, in the current conflict, Ernst was concerned with securing reasonably regular basic classes in regions far from Berlin – at the expense of staff contingents in the Berlin area. Maybe she put on the Scholz card – and lost. A Brandenburg? That too has been lost.
Politically, it lays bare the crumbling power system of the SPD in the country. It is incomprehensible that Prime Minister Dietmar Woidke (SPD) and his state chancellery allowed the conflict to escalate in this way. crisis management? none.
The parliamentary group, led by the power-conscious and ambitious Daniel Keller, has now established itself as the second, independent center of power in the SPD – alongside Woidke. And dangerous for him. That never happened under the former regents Manfred Stolpe and Matthias Platzeck.
There is still a year until the next state election, the AfD is currently ahead. Dietmar Woidke wants to compete again. He is weakened by Ernst’s departure, the consequences of which are not yet foreseeable. Nothing seems impossible in Brandenburg, not even an earlier change in the SPD.
