Stuttgart (dpa / lsw) – Baden-Württemberg’s Interior Minister Thomas Strobl (CDU) has admitted that the affair about a passed letter from a lawyer is a personal burden to him. The CDU state chief said on Friday in the summer interview by SWR Aktuell about the affair and the pending investigative committee of the state parliament: “It doesn’t need a sock, it’s a difficult situation for me personally.” If he had known “what kind of wave that makes,” he would have tried to create transparency in other ways. But the Minister of the Interior also asked for your understanding: “We have a lot of decisions to make every day and a lot to do. If you look back, one or the other isn’t going so smoothly.”
The background is investigations against the highest-ranking police officer in the country, the police inspector, for sexual harassment. He’s suspended from duty. The man is said to have sexually harassed a colleague. Strobl is also indirectly under pressure because of the matter – he forwarded a letter from the inspector’s lawyer to a journalist and initially denied it. The public prosecutor’s office is therefore also investigating against him. The opposition demands Strobl’s resignation and wants to put him under pressure in a committee of inquiry.
The minister said in the interview that he had apologized several times for the “non-optimal communication” to forward the letter. When asked whether he felt sufficient backing from Prime Minister Winfried Kretschmann (Greens) and from the green-black coalition, the CDU politician said: “Winfried Kretschmann is a reliable and trustworthy partner. I also feel a lot of support in the coalition factions.” In such situations you also experience “very nice things” by receiving support from colleagues “from whom you would not have thought it at all”.
Strobl criticized the fact that for some members of the opposition, the result of the U-committee was already certain in advance. “They care about political antics.” Many of these MPs have been calling for his resignation for a long time. He couldn’t imagine that at the end of the committee they would say: “Now we’ll apologize to Mr. Strobl.” However, these members of parliament should not claim “that an independent investigation is being carried out”. He looked forward to the committee with “concentrated composure and realism”.
