Bärbel Bas has spoken publicly for the first time since resigning as Germany’s labour minister and SPD chair. In a television interview, she criticised Chancellor Friedrich Merz and members of both coalition parties, while calling for greater trust between the CDU and SPD so the government can continue working together.
Bas said she had been unfairly pressured by members of the Union over the timing of pension and labour-market reforms. According to advance reports from the WDR interview, she described the criticism as a campaign against her. Bas said the pension package had deliberately been delayed in agreement with the Union until after state elections in eastern Germany, and that the timetable had been discussed in the coalition committee.
She argued that, despite those agreements, she had been accused daily of failing to present the pension reform sooner. Bas said she raised the issue with Merz and told him she would not tolerate the attacks indefinitely. According to her account, the chancellor promised that the CDU would stop its public criticism, but she said this had no effect.
In September, CDU MP Christian von Stetten had called for Bas to resign, accusing her of blocking reforms. Bas said such a demand was inappropriate from a coalition partner speaking about its own minister. The Union, however, had also criticised her for not presenting labour-market reforms agreed by the coalition committee in July. Those measures were particularly important to the CDU because the SPD had accepted a tax increase for top earners as part of the coalition deal.
Bas also said she had sometimes wished for more backing from within the SPD. She faced criticism over the planned pension package, including from Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania’s premier, Manuela Schwesig, and later from other state politicians.
Bas explained that personal grief had contributed to her decision to resign. In September, she had cared for her stepdaughter, who was seriously ill with cancer, before her death. Bas said she needed time to process the loss and had found that she no longer had the mental space for political and official duties. She recalled a similar experience after her husband’s death in 2020 and said that, while accompanying her stepdaughter in a hospice, she had felt her strength running out.
Sources: Süddeutsche Zeitung.