Dhe management of the sports department in the Federal Ministry of the Interior is developing into an ejection seat. On Tuesday, Minister of the Interior Nancy Faeser put the undersecretary Beate Lohmann into early retirement. This was confirmed to the FAZ from a reliable source. Lohmann had succeeded Gerhard Böhm four years ago; previously she headed the department for administrative modernization and administrative organization.
Böhm had gotten into an open dispute with the leadership of the German Olympic Sports Confederation (DOSB). While Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere had backed his head of department, Horst Seehofer gave in to the pressure of the sport led by his CSU party friend Alfons Hörmann shortly after taking office and sent the man who had initiated the potential analysis and the top-class sport reform in April early retirement in 2018. This happened in such a hurry that the person concerned was surprised when he was on vacation – by a note in an employee letter. As a result, almost the entire department was renewed in terms of personnel.
The 61-year-old Rhinelander Lohmann is not known to have had any open disputes with the sports organizations. Nevertheless, rumors say that this time association representatives complained to Faeser and her parliamentary state secretary Mahmut Özdemir about irreconcilable differences between sport and the sports department. Like Özdemir, Lohmann was of the conviction that an independent top-class sports company should distribute or refuse the three hundred million euros in top-class sports funding from the federal government according to strict success criteria.
It was noticeable that the budget committee last week, in its adjustment session for the restart of club and mass sport, did not put the fifty million euros that were left over from the Corona aid for professional clubs in the budget of the Ministry of the Interior, as expected, but half , 25 million. The resolution is not backed by any concrete measures, the money is blocked for the time being. The householders are asking the Interior Ministry for a concept for the release.
This is an amazing process; arguments about the nature of the arguments are suspected. Help for mass sport after the corona pandemic is promised in the coalition agreement. On Tuesday, the DOSB called for a paradigm shift in federal sports policy. He should no longer be responsible for top-class sport alone, but for sport in its entirety. So far, it has been the task of the federal states to promote club, popular and young people’s sport.
