One thing distinguishes the witness testimony that Stephan Weil is facing this Thursday in the Hanover state parliament from many other witness testimony in parliamentary committees of inquiry. Lower Saxony’s head of government answers virtually all of the questions that representatives of the state parliament opposition ask him in great detail. The SPD politician almost never resorts to a memory lapse. This witness – and this is perhaps the most remarkable finding of this x-hour session – can actually remember most of it.
The case in question, which the opposition in the state parliament has labeled a “salary scandal”, is not particularly complex. Weil, who has been Prime Minister of Hanover since 2013, hired a new office manager for himself in February 2023 and increased her salary significantly shortly afterwards and in violation of the rules that had been in place until then. Instead of 6,301 euros, Aynur C., now 33, an SPD member and honorary chairwoman of the Social Democrats in Heidekreis, received 8,187 euros in basic salary after a “change in administrative practice”. A bureaucratic maneuver that Weil and his head of the State Chancellery, Jörg Mielke (SPD), initially pushed through against the express advice of the state administration employees responsible for such personnel matters. A case of nepotism and favoritism?
This Thursday, Weil first describes his view of things and first takes a federal politician out of the firing line: SPD federal leader Lars Klingbeil, from whose constituency Aynur C. comes. When he was looking for a new office manager at the end of 2022, Weil reports, he came up with C. himself. She had “struck him positively” at several events in previous years. There was no third-party recommendation for the new office manager, says Weil. There was also no appreciative advice from Hamburg, where C. had worked in the office of the local finance senator Andreas Dressel (SPD) before moving to Hanover. This at least deals with the part of the opposition’s accusation of “nepotism” that would have extended beyond the vastness of the Lower Saxony lowlands and local state politics.
The upgrade of the new office manager, including the contradictions from the ranks of the human resources department, was leaked to the Hanover media after a corresponding cabinet decision in December 2023 – and caused understandable excitement among the opposition. Since then, the CDU in particular has been making a sincere effort to prove to the previously relatively unchallenged Prime Minister and the Head of the State Chancellery that a comrade was favored inappropriately, including the illegal salary classification of Weil’s closest colleague. The AfD, the fourth force in the state parliament alongside the SPD, CDU and Greens, also asks some questions at the PUA meetings, but acts much more cautiously than the Union.
In the further course of his questioning, Weil repeatedly emphasized that his decision to upgrade his office manager was not about this individual case, but rather about a general imbalance in the pay of public service employees. According to the regulations in force in Lower Saxony until the end of last year, it would have taken the new office manager eight to ten years before she would have received a salary comparable to that of her civil servant predecessors.
Lateral entrants like C., who completed their university degree through a second educational path – “no picnic,” as Weil emphasizes – were disadvantaged by the previous salary rules. “Such an educational background must not be a disadvantage,” says Weil. In this respect, too, the change in current administrative practice made last autumn was primarily about making the public service more attractive as an employer.
This is the State Chancellery’s central line of defense. It was not Aynur C. who was at the center of the State Chancellery’s strong desire for change, but the general imbalance in the non-standard pay of public service employees. “It was not about an individual case, but about a general solution,” is the standard sentence that Weil repeatedly states on the record that day. And something else is clearly important to him: the comparison with the salary regulations of the other federal states. A query he himself initiated showed that Lower Saxony had been too strict with its previous pay practice, which was closely based on civil service law.
This Thursday, the Union is running in vain against this argumentative wall, which has now become quite solid. During the four-and-a-half hour-long questioning of the Prime Minister, its representatives are not able to seriously embarrass Weil. Carina Hermann, Parliamentary Secretary, does try repeatedly to explain that it is unfair to other public service employees that C., with her fresh Master’s degree, receives such a high salary. That the Prime Minister and his Head of State Chancellery were apparently primarily concerned with the individual case and not the bigger picture when changing the current administrative practice.
But Weil is just as tireless in emphasizing that he was not concerned with favoring the office manager, but rather with “fair pay” for her work. That the non-civil servant C. should receive comparable pay for this work to her civil servant predecessors. And they have been paid according to B2 for decades – the salary group that the new office manager’s salary is now based on. A dispute that could probably go on indefinitely.
In this respect, it is hardly surprising that Weil and his CDU opponent Hermann drew completely different conclusions about the day in the Hanover parliamentary committee of inquiry after the hearing. According to Hermann, Weil “has not been able to clear up the misconduct identified so far in his state chancellery”. Rather, it has become clear once again that “the fairy tale about the intention to increase the attractiveness of the public service is not true”.
Weil, on the other hand, left the investigative committee with the good feeling “that my answers were essentially unspectacular.” He assumes that the accusation that he had pushed through the promotion of his office manager “without regard for the losses” has now been “refuted.”