Opposition leader takes break to donate kidney to sick wife

FORMER GERMAN foreign minister Frank Walter Steinmeier is taking a break from politics to donate a kidney to his sick wife.

Mr Steinmeier, parliamentary head of the opposition Social Democrats (SPD), said the organ transplant would go ahead later this week.

Elke Büdenbender was reportedly told by doctors last February that she would need a kidney transplant. Faced with long waiting lists and what Mr Steinmeier described yesterday as “advanced kidney damage”, tests revealed her husband to be a perfect match.

“Owing to the lack of any alternative and because preliminary investigations permit it, I myself will be the organ donor,” said Mr Steinmeier (54) at a hastily organised press conference.

He made the decision in June and, all going well, he said he hoped to be back at work in October. The couple got married in 1995 and have a 14-year-old daughter.

The break comes at an inopportune time for the opposition leader, with the SPD’s various camps locked in an identity struggle after nearly a year in the opposition benches.

Mr Steinmeier gathered his experience in office as chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s right-hand man and chief strategist. But his Schröder connection, and four years in chancellor Merkel’s grand coalition cabinet, has been more of a hindrance than a help in the last months.

Many in the SPD blame the Schröder-era reforms for last year’s record low general election result of just 23 per cent, a campaign headed by Mr Steinmeier.

An ongoing debate about whether to retain the Schröder centrist course or shift to the left has crystallised in a debate over a Schröder-era pension reform extending the retirement age to 67 by 2023.

Party left-wingers argue that only a return to a retirement age of 65 can win back the support of traditional working class voters and the unions.

That has left defenders of the reform, including Mr Steinmeier, on the back foot. Their argument, that retiring at 67 is essential to keep the pension system solvent, has fallen on deaf ears in the SPD, anxious for a popular measure to prove its left-wing credentials and see off the threat from the new Left Party.

The absence of Mr Steinmeier, a key SPD centrist, is likely to increase the influence of SPD left-wing in the coming weeks. He will still be convalescing in September, when the party votes at its annual conference on a proposal to roll back the pension reform.

Mr Steinmeier is no stranger to transplants: in 1980 doctors discovered a tumour on his left cornea and only a transplant saved his eyesight.