Like her predecessor, Lisa Paus also meets the internal party proportional representation criteria of the German Greens. However, she is also regarded as a competent and experienced financial politician. In the Wirecard scandal, she stood out as a sharp-tongued critic of today’s Chancellor Scholz.
The new German Family Minister Lisa Paus, here at the beginning of the month as a speaker in the German Bundestag.
After the resignation of the German Family Minister Anne Spiegel, her party named a successor on Thursday: the 53-year-old member of the Bundestag Lisa Paus. As with Spiegel, the Greens have also opted for a politician who, until her appointment, had only attracted the attention of observers with an above-average interest in political events.
While her predecessor worked as a minister in the federal state of Rhineland-Palatinate until she left for Berlin, Paus has been politicizing at the federal level since 2009, but she never got beyond the role of an inconspicuous member of the German parliament. Paus’ appointment comes as a surprise; her name was not among those of the possible successors that had been publicly speculated about since Spiegel’s departure on Monday.
Unanimous decision of the party executive
After Spiegel’s departure, the Greens were repeatedly criticized for having relied on a female minister for reasons of internal party representation, who ultimately proved to be overwhelmed in her office. Paus’ appointment also corresponds to proportional representation: the fact that a woman had to be succeeded by a woman was hardly questioned in the party, and like Spiegel, Paus is attributed to the left wing of the Greens.
As before, three of the five Green federal ministers are considered so-called realos and two are left-wing. In the Realo camp, where some had called for a departure from the previous rigid proportional criteria after Spiegel’s resignation, some are likely to be strangers to Paus’ appointment. However, the decision in the board of the Greens was unanimous, said party leader Ricarda Lang on Thursday.
Lisa Paus was born the daughter of a manufacturer in Rheine, Westphalia. The mechanical engineering company in Emsland, Lower Saxony, which her father set up, is now run by her two older brothers. Paus has been a single mother to one son since 2013; at that time her partner died of cancer.
Paus launched her political career in the 1990s in Berlin, where she had come to study. In 1999, the graduate economist moved into the city’s parliament. There she made a name for herself as a budget and economic politician. She later retained this thematic orientation in the Bundestag, where she worked as spokeswoman for financial policy and most recently as chairperson of her party in the finance committee, where she campaigned for a property tax and a financial transaction tax as well as for the fight against tax fraud.
Rencontre with Scholz in the investigative committee
The fact that Paus is a member of the globalization-critical NGO Attac completes the picture of a decidedly left-wing financial politician. For the German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, whom she will now see again at the cabinet table, the new minister is no stranger: In the last legislative period, she stood out in the Wirecard investigative committee as a sharp-tongued critic of Scholz, who was still finance minister at the time. Among other things, she accused him of telling the truth.
In the eyes of her party colleagues, she should qualify for her new office above all because she has already worked at an interface between financial and family policy in recent years: Paus is considered one of the initiators of basic child security, a prestigious project of the German government, through which all previous financial support payments for children are to be replaced by a basic amount that is to be paid out for each child from the birth. The project is considered complex and its implementation is likely to last at least until the end of the legislative period in 2025; for Paus it could become the central project of her term of office.