Just four months after the formation of the German federal government made up of 50 percent women, the Minister of Family Affairs, the politician of the Greens who precisely applied the female quota, is leaving with severance pay.
The background to this is that Anne Spiegel, who, as provincial minister of environment and climate, was also responsible for disaster protection in the Ahr Valley area during last year's flood that ultimately claimed 134 lives, was chosen for the post - which could have called into question her leadership and situational awareness skills from the outset (especially , that in the statement issued in the hours before the disaster, he approved the phrase "extreme flooding is not expected", but noticed that one of the nouns was not written in a gender-neutral way),
however, it has now also been revealed that he and his family went on a four-week vacation to France in the middle of the rescue work.
Even at this point, we can be uncertain: are women really doing well with the female quotas, if in order to reach the minimum of 50 percent it is necessary to bring them to a happy-unhappy position, only to have a spectacular failure at the end of prime time, reinforcing the prejudices that we want to eradicate? Isn't 30 percent acceptable female role models (if applicable) more desirable than 50 percent quota women, including 20 percent incompetent careerists whose stupid sentences are full of all the news portals? (Luckily for us, at least a national consensus seems to be emerging on the subject: although Tímea Szabó - the grand dame of soft, compromising women's politics - even put forward a bill in 2014 so that women and men appear strictly alternately on the party lists, on the current opposition list the first four candidates of the Párbeszéd yet they are all men - obviously not out of old-fashioned male chauvinism, but because they were their most convincing people. MZP, Gergely Karácsony and Kocsis-Cake "Don't buy gas from tomorrow" Olivio. What can women be like then???)
But even more thought-provoking is Anne Spiegel's reasoning, with which she tried to justify her terribly timed one-month family vacation at a press conference, hoping to keep her post with an embarrassing defense speech.
The minister, who has four children, said: her husband had a stroke in 2019, and since then he has to avoid all stress, and the Covid quarantine period took a toll on their children, who are still only of kindergarten and junior high school age. That's why they had to relax together a little last year.
All of this is completely understandable in itself, and we even feel it together - except.
If we read the politician's biography, we can see that in addition to his position as provincial minister of family affairs, he was elected to the national council of the Greens at the end of 2019 (a few months after her husband's stroke), and then in 2021 (right in the middle of Covid) he also took on the provincial environmental protection portfolio and the leadership of the Ministry of Energy and (for the sake of security) the post of Deputy Prime Minister, plus he became the leader of the list of the Greens in the provincial elections. While her husband managed the four children at home 100 kilometers away during the closures due to the coronavirus.
Well, after all this, it seems a bit bold to appeal to the voters for their understanding due to summer exhaustion in 2021. With particular regard to those voters who lost their relatives and/or their entire existence in the tragically mismanaged flood last year.
In fact, it seems that - in addition to the failure of the quota system - we are witnessing the failure of a modern life lie: that is, that everything is compatible with everything else, that we must take advantage of every career opportunity that presents itself, otherwise FOMO will devour us; that even with four small children and a husband who suffered a stroke, the woman can move up the ranks without any problems, because she can do it, and because
only self-destructive mothers examine small arthropods with their children late in the afternoon on the way home from the playground, instead of heading to work dinner from their office with headsets in their ears.
Those who can afford it, those who have an affinity for it, can of course take on the responsibility associated with a privileged position as a mother of young children, no question - it would not be fair if men with already shorter lives were to do all the stressful work that increases the risk of cardiovascular diseases.
However, Haladárék managed to develop this to the point that they include women in stressful senior positions, because that is how they become somebody, and because that is what equality is, if the same number of women sit at the crisis meetings of the operational committees at midnight as there are men.
And when a woman dares to say that we don't have to constantly compete with men and that we don't have to earn at least the same amount every moment of our lives, screams erupt that how can someone say that, it's pure misogyny. However, probably Anne Spiegel would not have had to testify about her family failures in front of two merciless microphones, and perhaps she would not even have to live with the memory of the tragic flood, if she had dared to slow down for a while at the beginning of the epidemic, for the sake of the children (who are just that , whether it's equality and a change of roles here or there, they don't cry specifically for their mother when something hurts - it's some kind of weird conservative pinching for them).
This would have been the truly emancipated step: if necessary, to recognize one's own limitations and not to drift with the price of a quota career - in the comforting knowledge that retirement is still a long way off, there will be plenty of time to move on and find the right positions, God willing.
If my mother succeeded at that time, the inflexible XX. century, then even in the 2020s, every enlightened woman can believe that it is okay to pull the emergency brake from time to time.
In the cover photo, Federal Family Minister Anne Spiegel holds a press conference in Berlin on April 10, 2022, at which she announced her resignation. Source: MTI/AP/DPA/Annette Riedl
Francesca Rivafinoli / vasarnap.hu
