Darmstadt: Mayor and city councilor threatens the end

• ofJens Joachim

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The three-part alliance made up of the Greens, CDU and Volt wants to prematurely vote out the full-time magistrate members Rafael Reisser (CDU) and Barbara Boczek (Greens) elected by the green-black coalition.

More than two months after the local elections, the Greens, CDU and Volt have not yet agreed on a coalition agreement, but on initial personnel decisions. During the second city council meeting on Thursday next week, the three future coalition parties want to vote out Mayor Rafael Reisser (CDU) and City Councilor Barbara Boczek (Greens).

The 63-year-old former CDU chairman, Reißer, has been responsible as mayor for security and order, the education sector and schools as well as for sport, the clubs and the issues of health and consumer protection since 2011. He was re-elected for a further six-year term in February 2017.

On the same day, Boczek was elected the new full-time city councilor. She was initially the head of the building and transport department. After several months of illness, she has only been a construction department head since August 2019.

According to a joint announcement by the Greens, CDU and Volt, the new designated coalition partner Volt is to be represented in the magistrate with a full-time department. The division of the departments is still “the subject of ongoing coalition negotiations,” said the parliamentary group chairmen Hildegard Förster-Heldmann (Greens), Roland Desch (CDU) and Nicolas Kämmerer (Volt).

Kämmerer said: “We look forward to working together in this three-way alliance over the next five years. The assumption of responsibility also belongs to the full-time magistrate. “

CDU parliamentary group leader Desch announced that after the local elections it was necessary to “accept that the office of mayor should be placed in other hands”. In the election on March 14, the CDU only got 15.6 percent of the vote.

The candidate of the Greens for the full-time magistrate post could be board spokesman Jürgen Deicke. The co-board spokeswoman and group leader Förster-Heldmann did not want to comment on the speculation on Tuesday.

The decision to vote out City Councilor Boczek was made “with the clear knowledge” that she “does not have the requirement profile to fulfill the full range of tasks of a newly formed department with expanded and even more complex responsibilities”. At the start of a new electoral term, it is “important to evaluate and review the distribution of tasks and department layouts and, if necessary, to change them,” said Förster-Heldmann.