Jens Spahn, then health minister, in 2021. Photograph: Odd Andersen/AFP/Getty Images
Tania Roettger
The powerful politician was no stranger to controversy, but brazenly defying a ban on surrogacy that he had long defended was the last straw
Up until last week, Jens Spahn was, by all accounts, a model of political success in Germany. At just 22, he was elected to the Bundestag for the conservative Christian Democrats (CDU), and rose steadily through the ranks of the party. He was a leading official in the finance ministry, led the ministry of health through Covid and, in 2025, became his party’s leader in parliament, arguably the second-most powerful post in the country. Controversies – and there were many in more than two decades in politics – did not seem to stymie his rise to power.
So when Spahn was made to resign after announcing that he had become a father after he and his husband used a surrogate mother in the US, there was a moment of disbelief among those who thought him a Teflon political operator immune to scandal. Why was surrogacy the issue that finally brought him down? That this was the final straw for his party revealed how, in the conservative Germany of today, reproductive politics can mark a red line.
Surrogacy in Germany is illegal, and the CDU is clearly opposed to the practice. The German public is evenly split on the issue (although 20% of voters in a recent poll said that they did not have an opinion), and the opposition Green party is the only one in the Bundestag proposing to legalise unpaid, “altruistic” surrogacy. But when a fellow CDU member, Hendrik Streeck, announced the birth of his son, also via surrogacy in the US, earlier this year, it did not cause much of a backlash.
When it came to Spahn however, there was something different. Namely, deep layers of hypocrisy and the involvement of a leading politician who wascertainly respected, but also feared and disliked – a divisive figure, with ties to the US right, who maybe finally had done one too many things wrong. The existence of the baby, revealed in an exclusive for the tabloid Bild, caused a storm, with disbelief and anger in various CDU WhatsApp groups, indicating that Spahn had gone too far, and exhausted his party’s patience.
Spahn certainly misread the room. In February, at the annual party conference, CDU members voted to keep the surrogacy prohibition, including when the practice is unpaid, “to prevent abuse, exploitation and health risks”.
Spahn had sat there, knowing a woman in the US was carrying a child that would become his, and had not said a word. After he revealed his paternity, in a podcast interview meant to calm the waves of criticism, he said that he couldn’t explain why he did not speak up then. He acknowledged the discrepancy between his private choices and the politics he supported, as well as the fact that most people would not be able to pay to bypass the law as he did. (Surrogacy in the US costs at least $100,000.)
For the most part, he remained unapologetic. The podcaster asked how he would vote if the issue came back to the Bundestag. Since he would expect discipline from his party members, he said, he would also vote against surrogacy. At this point it became impossible to understand his logic as anything but brazen hypocrisy.
Spahn also failed to grasp what was at stake for his party. Today’s CDU is one that is damaged in the polls and the CDU chancellor, Friedrich Merz, is deeply unpopular. In September, several tense elections will take place in German states, with the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) having a very comfortable lead in two of them. It was one of the leaders of the CDU there who first publicly called for Spahn’s resignation. No wonder that Merz, who seemed at times to be on the losing side of a power battle with Spahn, did not fight for him.
Spahn had made enough missteps in his career for German media to make lists of them. In 2020, during the pandemic, he held a fundraising dinner without wearing a mask – while he was advocating for strict distancing and isolation rules as minister of health. He tested positive the next day and never revealed the names of the attenders. The donations that were sought were of the amount of €9,999: €1 shy of the threshold where political donations have to be publicly declared. At the time, Spahn’s office merely confirmed that those attending had made donations in the aftermath of the gathering.
Then there were the billions of euros his ministry spent on worthless PPE during the pandemic, specifically masks that were unusable. He bought them for inflated prices from companies that had a connection to the CDU. Spahn later said that he never himself profited from the deals and had not wanted to broker deals with friends from his party.
He also got a loan from a bank in his constituency to buy a €4m Gründerzeit villa in a posh Berlin suburb, leading to questions about how he, a full-time politician, and his husband, a lobbyist for a media company, could secure such a loan. He never provided a satisfactory answer. Instead, his lawyers initially pursued the media in an attempt to suppress reporting of the price of the villa, but ultimately gave up due to public pressure for transparency.
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None of these controversies, which drew criticism from across the political spectrum, led to the party seriously questioning his position. It is only right that Spahn has now quit, for his hypocrisy was unbearable and untenable. But he should have resigned – or been made to – long before the surrogacy revelation. As it stands, he will keep his seat in parliament. Who is to say he won’t eventually make a comeback and even rise to the height of political power again. He’s already shown he has the thick skin to try.
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Tania Roettger is a journalist based in Berlin
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