# Ulla Schmidt

# Ulla Schmidt

Ursula "Ulla" Schmidt (née Radermacher; born 13 June 1949 in Aachen) is a German politician of the [Social Democratic Party of Germany](/organizations/social-democratic-party-of-germany) and a former teacher of special education. She sat in the Bundestag from 1990 until 2021 and was federal minister of health from 2001 to 2009, with additional responsibility for social security from 2002 to 2005. From 2013 to 2017 she was a vice-president of the Bundestag. Since her election by the members' assembly in Marburg on 22 September 2012 she has chaired the Bundesvereinigung Lebenshilfe, an association for people with intellectual disabilities and their families.

Schmidt grew up in Aachen with a younger sister after her parents' divorce; her mother, who raised them, worked in a factory. She took the Abitur in 1968 at the municipal Einhard-Gymnasium, studied psychology and trained as a teacher for primary and lower-secondary schools, passing the first state examination in 1974 and the second in 1976, and from 1980 to 1984 qualified at the FernUniversität Hagen to teach the rehabilitation of pupils with learning and behavioural difficulties. At the 1976 federal election she stood in the Aachen city constituency for the Maoist Communist League of West Germany, a candidacy Munzinger describes as provoking a professional ban under the 1972 Radikalenerlass; she was at first not taken into the school service. She joined the SPD in 1983, remained a city councillor in Aachen until 1992, and from November 1998 to January 2001 was deputy chair of the SPD parliamentary group for labour and social affairs, women, family and seniors.

On 10 January 2001 Chancellor [Gerhard Schröder](/people/gerhard-schroder) named her to succeed health minister Andrea Fischer, who had resigned with agriculture minister Karl-Heinz Funke during the BSE crisis. Schröder said consumer interests should guide the health portfolio and that Schmidt met the requirements of a difficult office. She stayed in the ministry through the second Schröder cabinet and the first cabinet of [Angela Merkel](/people/angela-merkel). The Act to Strengthen Competition in Statutory Health Insurance, passed by the Bundestag and Bundesrat in February 2007 and in force from 1 April 2007, recast financing and the relationship between statutory and private insurance. After the Bundesrat vote Schmidt said several hundred thousand people who had lost cover would be taken back in, and that nobody should be able to lose it in future. A central health fund, into which contributions and tax money were to flow and from which insurers would receive a basic allocation plus supplements for older and sicker members, was scheduled to start on 1 January 2009.

In the summer of 2009 her official car, driven by her chauffeur to Dénia on the Spanish coast, was stolen from the house where the driver was staying, and opposition politicians accused her of wasting public money on a private holiday. She said the rules allowed both official and private use, that private kilometres were logged and taxed, and that she also kept official appointments while on leave. The Federal Court of Auditors later wrote that she had used the car within the applicable rules and that the federal budget had suffered no loss; she said she would tax the private journeys, including the drive of about 2,500 kilometres, as a benefit in kind. [Frank-Walter Steinmeier](/people/frank-walter-steinmeier), the SPD's candidate for chancellor, had kept a place on his campaign team open until the audit was finished. When the grand coalition ended, the outgoing SPD ministers received their letters of dismissal; Schmidt, then 60 and nearly nine years in office, had lost the Aachen constituency and returned to parliament on the North Rhine-Westphalia list. She did not stand in the 2021 federal election.

## Early life and education

### Childhood in Aachen

Ursula "Ulla" Schmidt was born on 13 June 1949 in Aachen; her birth name was Ursula Radermacher. Her parents separated early, and she grew up with a younger sister in the household of her mother, a factory worker. She has described a larger family in neighbouring flats of the same building: grandparents next door, and an aunt with her husband and three children, with her grandmother cooking while her mother was at work. A 2006 *[Cicero](/people/cicero)* profile reported social housing of about two and a half rooms, no room of her own, and that she looked after her younger sister, later Brigitte Radke, and fought for her in the street.

There was no kindergarten until one was built in the 1950s for her younger sister. She played in the street and on the rubble lots of post-war Aachen, in a quarter of tramway and postal workers where, she said, people had similarly little money, sometimes bought groceries on credit, and lent one another small necessities. She remembered divorce as stigmatising in the 1950s, but said she felt no class difference in the street itself; that appeared at secondary school, among classmates in larger flats.

### Schooling and teacher training

Schmidt attended a Volksschule and later said she loved learning and reading. In the fifth year, after a three-day entrance examination, she moved to a girls' Realschule. She recalled the view that children of women workers were not assumed to suit further schooling, and that a girls' Realschule might be manageable for a child whose mother was on her own; sending girls on to a Gymnasium, she said, was not yet usual. Families bought the textbooks, about 100 marks a year by her account. She then took the *Aufbaugymnasium* track at Aachen's municipal Einhard-Gymnasium and in 1968 became the first in her family to pass the Abitur. She later called herself "a typical child of the social-liberal education reform." At about 18, at a union meeting, she heard an old official say that only someone able to secure their own livelihood was free to decide their life; she has credited that sentence with her determination to qualify and earn her own money.

After the Abitur she studied psychology at RWTH Aachen University and trained for primary and lower-secondary teaching (*Grund- und Hauptschule*) at the Pädagogische Hochschule Aachen. She passed the first state examination in 1974 and, after the *Referendariat*, the second in 1976. By then she was separated from her husband and raising a five-year-old daughter, the one child recorded in her Bundestag biography.

Already teaching pupils classed as having learning disabilities, she enrolled in 1980 at the distance-teaching FernUniversität in Hagen for the qualification in rehabilitating children with learning disabilities and behavioural difficulties (*lernbehindert* and *erziehungsschwierig* in the course title). Until 1984 she studied beside the job with three Aachen-area colleagues who had also been placed in special schools without that training. Work went by post and examinations were sat in Hagen; the group obtained a reduction of five lessons a week from the government of North Rhine-Westphalia so they could study. She took the third state examination in 1984. A full-time course, she said, was impossible while she earned a living and her daughter was still young. She also took extra classes, including mathematics and logic.

## Teaching and the Radical Decree

### Employment ban and the KBW

On 28 January 1972 Chancellor [Willy Brandt](/people/willy-brandt) and the minister-presidents required public-service applicants and staff to guarantee loyalty to the free democratic basic order of the Basic Law. The Radikalenerlass backed that rule with routine enquiries to the offices for the protection of the constitution. By 1976 nearly half a million applicants had been screened and 430 rejected; about 80 percent of those affected were teachers. In practice the checks centred on the German Communist Party and on Maoist K-Gruppen, including the Kommunistischer Bund Westdeutschland (KBW). A federal lexicon says those groups sought to abolish bourgeois society, if necessary by arms, and the effect was called a *Berufsverbot*.

*Cicero* quoted a 1976 intelligence assessment, from the chancellorship of [Helmut Schmidt](/people/helmut-schmidt), in which the KBW still proposed to smash the “bourgeois state apparatus” and reach a “dictatorship of the proletariat” by violent revolution. At the Bundestag election of 3 October 1976 the party won 0.1 percent of the vote and no seats.

In Aachen the 27-year-old trainee Ulla Schmidt stood for the KBW against Dieter Schinzel of the SPD. Constituency 53 recorded 198 KBW first votes and 131 second votes. *Cicero* called the candidacy symbolic and cited 131 votes—the second votes, not the first. She told the magazine she had not formally joined, though she remembered an unnamed auxiliary group. *Cicero* is also the source for a 15 July 1976 *Kommunistische Volkszeitung* item presenting her open letter to the regional governor as a refusal to swear loyalty to the Basic Law. After declining to declare that she had never belonged to a communist group, she was not hired for the school form she had trained for, and a union from her student years expelled her.

For about three months she was assistant to the manager at a Woolworth store in Aachen. *Cicero* wrote that the KBW paper had told the authorities a “U. Schmidt” collected 30 marks in class toward rifles for youth in Zimbabwe. She said she was accused of supporting murderous regimes, while her pupils had wanted to donate after a book about children there. The magazine did not verify that claim. On 20 March 2009, answering an Abgeordnetenwatch question that dated a communist candidacy to 1983, she wrote that she had never been a member of a communist organisation or active in party politics. The reply, which does not mention 1976, said youthful idealism and concern for the “Third World” had drawn her to aspects of communism.

### Special-education posts

Before the election she was offered special education in Stolberg—the “prairie,” as she put it—and said any teaching post would do. Dismissal proceedings began at once; she credited an older, devout school inspector with keeping her. The SPD in North Rhine-Westphalia lists her at Stolberg’s school for pupils with learning disabilities from 1976 to 1985. She told *Cicero* that after the German Autumn of 1977 she left the KBW over what she saw as its failure to distance itself from the [Red Army Faction](/organizations/red-army-faction)’s murder of Hanns Martin Schleyer. *Cicero* dates that engagement to 1975–1978 and a later full rehabilitation.

From 1980 to 1984, while teaching, she completed a FernUniversität Hagen qualification for pupils with learning disabilities and behavioural difficulties. From 1985 to 1990 the same SPD note places her in the integration section of the former Aachen district’s school for educational assistance. That designation is the one used for the Astrid-Lindgren-Schule in Eschweiler, Hüchelner Straße 206, whose support association was registered on 9 October 1986 as the “Förderverein der Astrid Lindgren Schule (Schule für Erziehungshilfe des Kreises Aachen).” The note ends her teaching in 1990, when she entered the Bundestag.

## Entry into the SPD and local politics

### Joining the party

Ulla Schmidt joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) in 1983. The biography published by the SPD in North Rhine-Westphalia dates the entry to 1 July 1983. In a 2006 interview with *Cicero* she tied the step to family habit as well as to politics: after the 1982 vote of no confidence that removed Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, her mother began attending SPD meetings, and Schmidt drove her there. Dieter Schinzel, the Social Democrat who had opposed her in the Aachen Bundestag constituency in 1976, already knew her from that campaign; *Cicero* later called him the political mentor of her move into the SPD. That 1976 candidacy had been for the Maoist Communist League of West Germany. Asked on Abgeordnetenwatch in 2009 about a communist candidacy—the questioner had dated it to 1983—she wrote that she had never belonged to a communist organisation, had not been active in party politics on that side, and had joined the SPD in 1983 as a convinced Social Democrat.

Local office followed within a year. Bundestag biographies, based on members’ own statements, list her on the executive of the SPD sub-district (*Unterbezirk*) Aachen and on the federal party council (*Parteirat*). The state association dates the sub-district executive from 1984 to 2016 and *Parteirat* membership from 1990, the year she entered the Bundestag.

She later aligned with the Seeheimer Kreis, a current inside the SPD Bundestag group. *Cicero* wrote that she had moved from the SPD left to the Seeheimers, whom the magazine called economically liberal, and quoted her as saying she had found more warmth there: “It is good to have one’s friends when things get hard.” The circle’s own history treats a meeting of about forty [Social Democrats](/organizations/social-democrats) at the Dorint Hotel in Lahnstein in early September 1974 as its founding, although [Hans-Jochen Vogel](/people/hans-jochen-vogel) told those present it was not a founding assembly and a similar group had met there the year before. That account says the circle meant to leave what it called the “theoretical and ideological defensive” against Marxist currents in the SPD and, in the line of the 1959 Godesberg Program, to keep the party in [the centre](/organizations/the-centre) and able to govern as a people’s party. Known first as the Lahnsteiner Kreis, it took the name Seeheimer after 1978 meetings at a former Lufthansa training centre in Seeheim. As a grouping of Bundestag members, it belongs to her years in parliament from 1990.

### Aachen city council

Her first elected office was a seat on the council chosen on 1 October 1989. The *taz*, reporting the public count in the Aachen town hall, wrote that the CDU fell from 49.2 to 40.7 percent and that a red–green majority of 30 seats to 29 ended what the paper called forty-five years of uninterrupted CDU government in the city. The local SPD called the result a historic day. The Social Democratic candidate for mayor was Jürgen Linden, whom the *taz* said the new majority was expected to elect. The North Rhine-Westphalia SPD lists Schmidt as a councillor from 1989 to 1992 and as housing-policy spokesperson of the SPD group. Bundestag biographies record the mandate as lasting until 1992, so that it overlapped the start of her Bundestag membership in 1990.

## Bundestag member, 1990–2001

### Elections and the Aachen constituency

At the first all-German federal election, on 2 December 1990, Schmidt stood for the SPD in Wahlkreis 053 Aachen, the city constituency that Bundestag biographies later call Aachen I. The official return listed her as Ursula Schmidt, born in 1949 and a teacher of special education. The direct seat went to Hans Stercken of the CDU, with 60,208 first votes (45.0 percent) against 56,343 (42.1 percent) for the SPD; turnout was 79.2 percent of 170,863 eligible voters. She entered the 12th Bundestag in 24th place on the state list of North Rhine-Westphalia.

In 1994 the direct mandate again went elsewhere. On the Federal Returning Officer's table for Wahlkreis 053, with the votes recalculated onto the 1998 boundaries, Armin Laschet (CDU) is recorded as elected, with 64,231 first votes (46.2 percent) to the SPD's 58,930 (42.4 percent), on a turnout of 82.7 percent. Schmidt remained in the 13th Bundestag and was addressed in the chamber as the SPD member for Aachen, so the seat she held was a list mandate.

She won the constituency in 1998. The Returning Officer recorded Ursula Schmidt (SPD) as elected, with 65,660 first votes (47.3 percent), 4.9 points above the SPD's 1994 share on the same map, against Laschet's 59,075 (42.5 percent). Turnout was 84.1 percent of 166,969 eligible voters, and her first-vote share exceeded the SPD's second-vote share in the constituency, 39.2 percent. She was again 24th on the North Rhine-Westphalia list.

### Equality, labour and social policy

From 1991 to 1998 Schmidt chaired the SPD group's cross-sectional working group on equality between women and men (*Querschnittsgruppe „Gleichstellung von Frau und Mann“*) and sat on the group's executive; the Bundestag presidium's account also names her, for those years, as spokesperson of a project group on family policy in the 21st century.

In May 1993, as the Joint Constitutional Commission redrafted Article 3 of the Basic Law, Schmidt, Ursula Männle (CDU) and Margret Funke-Schmitt-Rink of the FDP called the draft a minimal consensus, short of the explicit power to advance women that the SPD wanted. SPD women also failed to extend Article 6, on marriage and the family, to lasting non-marital partnerships, which the CDU/CSU opposed. By the debate of 24 November 1994 in Bonn the Article 3 amendment had passed; Family Minister Claudia Nolte called it a jointly adopted clarification of equality. Speaking for the SPD, Schmidt said influence, power, money and the split between paid and unpaid work still tracked sex, and that about 60 percent of employed women had no income they could live on. Women in eastern Germany, she said, were being pushed out even of occupations long treated as women's work, and she asked for laws that would open employment to women and make career and family a matter for men as well.

The same brief ran into the reform of sexual offences. Rape inside marriage could be punished as coercion, not as rape. In March 1997 Schmidt and Irmingard Schewe-Gerigk of Alliance 90/[The Greens](/organizations/the-greens) tabled group bill 13/7324, also signed by Vera Lengsfeld, Irmgard Schwaetzer and Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger. It followed the coalition draft but dropped the "objection clause", which would have let a wife halt a prosecution of her husband. Opening the final readings on 15 May 1997, Schmidt argued that marriage must not become a space outside the law. The recorded vote was 643 cast, 470 in favour, 138 against and 35 abstentions, and the bill passed. Horst Eylmann (CDU) noted that the SPD and the Greens had earlier accepted an objection clause; President Rita Süssmuth credited initiatives Schmidt had revived more than once.

On Monday 9 November 1998 the SPD group, under its new chair Peter Struck, attached the deputy chairs to subject areas and elected Schmidt for social policy, labour, women and youth. The Bundestag biography gives the office, held until January 2001, as deputy chair for labour and social affairs, women, family and seniors. The post ended that January, when she was appointed federal minister of health.

## Federal Minister of Health

### Appointment after the BSE crisis

On 9 January 2001 Health Minister Andrea Fischer of Alliance 90/The Greens and Agriculture Minister Karl-Heinz Funke resigned after bovine spongiform encephalopathy had been confirmed in German herds. Fischer cited lost public confidence in consumer protection; Funke cited a lack of coalition backing for his farm policy. The next day Chancellor Gerhard Schröder named [Renate Künast](/people/renate-kunast) to a ministry rebuilt around consumer protection, food and agriculture, and chose Ulla Schmidt, deputy chair of the Social Democratic Party of Germany group in the Bundestag, as health minister. Powers over consumer protection were to leave the health ministry, which Schröder said should itself move closer to consumers. She took office on 12 January 2001.

From 22 October 2002, in Schröder’s second cabinet, the portfolio was the Federal Ministry of Health and Social Security. After the 2005 election she remained in Angela Merkel’s first cabinet and, from 22 November 2005, was again head of the Federal Ministry of Health. She left on 27 October 2009, when President [Horst Köhler](/people/horst-kohler) dismissed the outgoing cabinet; [Philipp Rösler](/people/philipp-rosler) of the Free Democratic Party succeeded her.

### Statutory health-insurance reforms

The central statute of the first term was the Statutory Health Insurance Modernisation Act (*GKV-Modernisierungsgesetz*). On 8 September 2003 the SPD, the [Christian Democratic Union](/organizations/christian-democratic-union-of-germany), the [Christian Social Union](/organizations/christian-social-union-in-bavaria) and the Greens introduced it together. The bill said medical progress and an ageing population were outrunning contribution income, and that higher rates would raise labour costs. The sponsors rejected rationing and estimated relief for the funds of about €10 billion in 2004, rising to about €14–15 billion in 2007. Principal provisions were to take effect on 1 January 2004.

Adults owed a practice fee (*Praxisgebühr*) of €10 once each quarter for the first outpatient visit to a contracted doctor, dentist or psychotherapist, unless a referral from the same quarter applied. The memorandum said the fee should strengthen personal responsibility and help consolidate the funds; with other co-payments it was capped at 2 percent of gross income a year, or 1 percent for chronic illness. Children were exempt, as were vaccinations, the check-ups in § 25 of Social Code Book V and specified preventive dental care. Hospital treatment cost €10 a day for at most 28 days a year. Medicines generally required 10 percent, at least €5 and at most €10, and non-prescription drugs stayed reimbursable only in narrow cases.

The bill also dropped funeral and confinement grants and non-medical sterilisation, limited spectacles largely to children and people with severe visual impairment, and restricted statutory funding of assisted reproduction, with a 50 percent co-payment. It created an Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care to assess evidence and medicines for the Federal Joint Committee, and let funds pay bonuses for check-ups and prevention.

### The health fund and universal coverage

On 24 October 2006 the CDU/CSU and SPD introduced the Statutory Health Insurance Competition Strengthening Act (*GKV-Wettbewerbsstärkungsgesetz*). Its stated aims were cover for every resident without insurance, access to necessary care regardless of contributions paid, and a financing reform beside changes in purchasing care. The draft put annual relief near €1.8 billion from 2007 and federal subsidies, for tasks treated as society-wide rather than purely insurance tasks, at €1.5 billion in 2008 and €3 billion in 2009.

On 2 February 2007, as the Bundestag moved to adopt the bill, Schmidt said everyone would be insured against illness — “welcome to solidarity” for those who had not been — and that “prevention before treatment” and “rehabilitation before long-term care” ran through the text. She called differing rates for the same benefits hard to justify, and universal cover a step a grand coalition could take. Private full cover would remain, but insurers would have to accept applicants without regard to illness, disability or age.

From 1 April 2007, people with no other cover who had last been statutorily insured, or never insured in either system, became compulsory statutory members, apart from groups assigned to private insurance. Private insurers had to offer a basic tariff on statutory benefits, without risk surcharges. From 1 January 2009 contributions went into a health fund (*Gesundheitsfonds*): funds still collected them but transferred them in full, and the Federal Insurance Office paid back a basic amount per person plus morbidity-based risk adjustments, with a federal subsidy. The government set the opening general rate at 15.5 percent of contributory income, including a 0.9-point share paid only by the insured, and a reduced rate of 14.9 percent. A shortfall could be met by an extra contribution capped at 1 percent of contributory income; a surplus could be returned. The single rate was set by ordinance, not by each fund.

### Medicines, prevention and the electronic health card

The 2003 Act extended reference prices (*Festbeträge*) as reimbursement ceilings for comparable drugs and gave the quality institute a role in assessing medicines. The 2007 Act added a cost-benefit test so that a price would relate to benefit against existing treatment. Schmidt said the aim was to keep useful advances available regardless of ability to pay. The same statute, as she described it to the Bundestag, created a claim to palliative care, increased support for hospices, and opened hospitals to outpatient care of rare and severe diseases.

A broader prevention statute did not pass. In February 2005 the SPD and Greens tabled an Act to Strengthen Health Prevention, with a prevention foundation and about €250 million a year, mostly from the health, pension, accident and long-term-care insurers. The Bundestag adopted it on 21 April 2005 against the CDU/CSU and the FDP. Union-led states in the Bundesrat objected to the new bodies and to financing from contributions; mediation was unfinished when the early dissolution of the Bundestag caused the bill to lapse.

The modernisation law also required an electronic health card to replace the insurance card, envisaged from 2006. Administrative data were mandatory; emergency data and a medication record were voluntary. An electronic prescription was a mandatory use, while clinical data generally needed the patient’s release, usually by PIN, and a health-professional card, with access logged. Issue slipped. In September 2009 most statutory funds in the Nordrhein region of North Rhine-Westphalia set 1 October 2009 to collect photographs and then send cards: offline administrative cards with a picture, meant to hinder misuse. Online updates were still thought unlikely before 2011, and a full national switch was planned by the end of 2010. Children and some people unable to supply a photograph were exempt.

## Criticism and political reception

### Doctors, insurers and patients

The quarterly practice fee in the Statutory Health Insurance Modernisation Act, in force from 1 January 2004, drew the widest reaction. Adults in statutory health insurance paid €10 at the first doctor or dentist visit each quarter, including a visit made only for a prescription; referrals and some preventive care were exempt, and a non-emergency patient who could not pay could be sent home. Charges were capped at 2 percent of gross income, or 1 percent for chronic illness.

Opposition began with the Social Democratic Party–Green outline of May 2003, which also raised drug co-payments and proposed abolishing the funeral grant. The VdK said disabled and older people would bear the main burden; the Free Democratic Party spoke of a "declaration of war on patients and doctors"; and Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union deputy leader Horst Seehofer rejected an "entrance fee" for surgeries. The National Association of Statutory Health Insurance Physicians said most patients then paid, though many had come in December to avoid the charge, and two Franconian practitioners staged a barrier.

Doctors' bodies stayed hostile. In December 2002 Berlin physicians threatened closures so patients would "sit a trial in hell"; Schmidt called that incompatible with medical ethics and warned of sanctions. On 4 December 2006, against the grand coalition reform, organisers said about a third of practices closed. German Medical Association president Jörg-Dietrich Hoppe called patients "the losers" and warned of "state medicine"; Schmidt said sick people were being "taken hostage for demands for more money". Sickness funds rejected the blueprint. Chancellor Angela Merkel gave Schmidt her "full support", said they agreed "100 percent", and called the reform the coalition's "most difficult subject".

Evaluations of the fee diverged. A 2005 AOK institute survey of 3,000 insurees found that 83.7 percent of those seeing several doctors used only referrals, and that 9.4 percent had skipped or delayed a visit because of the fee, down from 11.7 percent, with the early gap for low-income patients fading. RWI Essen economists, comparing statutory insurees with the privately insured and with under-18s, found no statistically significant effect on whether someone saw a doctor. The VdK remained dissatisfied overall but called the chronic-illness co-payment rule acceptable.

### Data protection and the Big Brother Award

On 29 October 2004 the German Big Brother Awards, whose jury included the [Chaos Computer Club](/organizations/chaos-computer-club), gave Schmidt the health-and-social-affairs prize in Bielefeld for the modernisation act. The citation argued that funds would receive person-related outpatient invoices as well as pharmacy and hospital bills, and could assemble illness profiles.

The prize followed an official warning. On 25–26 September 2003 federal and state data-protection commissioners welcomed patient control of the planned health card, but objected to outpatient bills that carried the insured person's diagnosis. Funds could gain "comprehensive and intimate knowledge" of 60 million people, a "glass patient", even after use was limited to billing and audit. The organisers viewed the electronic health card, then due in early 2006, with "extreme scepticism". Federal commissioner Peter Schaar did not reject it. In June 2005 he said a card with administrative data and a photograph could come the next year, but fuller records would take five to ten years — "quality before speed" — and that patients should decide what was stored and who could read it.

### Standing inside the SPD and the coalition

The 2006 health-fund compromise split Schmidt's group even as Merkel backed her. SPD expert Karl Lauterbach forecast a contribution rate "clearly above 15 percent" and an exit of higher earners into private cover. After the parliamentary group met on 17 October 2006 he spoke of "a majority of rejecting voices" and called the fund superfluous. Schmidt called the discussion "very fair" and said the group saw the Union deal as the best compromise available.

Andrea Nahles called much of the plan "incoherent, contradictory or simply wrong". Wolfgang Wodarg spoke of more than 30 Social Democrats who wanted to block or delay the bill; participants said that view found little echo, while Peter Struck asked for trust after an "intensive debate". Union chair Volker Kauder expected a large majority, though younger deputies objected to the cap on supplementary premiums.

## Official-car controversy

### The Spain trip and the theft

In July 2009 Schmidt, federal health minister, holidayed near Dénia on the Costa Blanca and flew at her own expense. An armoured Mercedes-Benz S-Class, reported as an S 320 CDI worth about €100,000, was driven from Berlin by her chauffeur, some 2,400 to 2,500 kilometres, with office equipment aboard. The Federal Ministry of Health said the car was for official business in Spain and that she had hired another for private use. Accounts of those engagements conflicted: a German embassy event for resident Germans; a talk on 27 July in Els Poblets on care abroad; a meeting with Dénia's mayor; and, in a letter to the Bundestag budget committee, only one official appointment.

The car was stolen in Dénia on the night of 21–22 July from the chauffeur's house, several kilometres from Schmidt's. Police said a rear door had been left open and the keys taken, and denied that he had been drugged. The ministry said a grille had been forced and that state secretary Klaus Theo Schröder wrote the driver was drugged. The car was uninsured; the ministry said federal vehicles were usually left without comprehensive cover, the state meeting any loss. About a week later it was with the Guardia Civil in Oliva, some 20 kilometres north, after the Federal Criminal Police Office and the Policía Nacional had contradicted each other.

### Cost dispute and the audit

Schmidt called the row "Theater im Sommerloch" and said, "Das steht mir zu, wie jedem, der einen Dienstwagen hat" ("That is my due, as for anyone with a company car"). Ministers had a personally assigned car for unrestricted use; private trips were free of a fee but taxable. Her office said she had taxed 6,111 private kilometres in 2008.

The ministry told budget-committee chair Otto Fricke of the Free Democratic Party that a round trip of about 5,000 kilometres cost about €3,200, including fuel, tolls and the driver's lodging and allowances, and was cheaper than flying the equipment and hiring a car. Reiner Holznagel of the German Taxpayers' Association, in figures *Der Spiegel* reported from *Bild*, put the minimum at €9,386, excluding a replacement car. FDP member Jürgen Koppelin and other opposition politicians called it a waste of taxes and demanded a report.

The ministry said the car had gone to Spain each year from 2004. In 2004 and 2005 it cited personal protection and treated the driver's solo trips as untaxed official "empty runs"; in 2006 to 2008 it cited a basic office so she could be reached. Private kilometres were, it said, logged and taxed. In 2009 the presence of the chauffeur's 15-year-old son, travelling with Schmidt's approval, made the journey private: of nearly 5,000 kilometres she claimed only 72, on two official trips, and said she would tax the rest, including the long drive.

On 8 August the Bundesrechnungshof closed an unpublished audit. Its letter, quoted by the Deutsche Presse-Agentur, said she had used the car within the rules and the federal budget had suffered no loss; spokesman Martin Winter told Spiegel the same. Schmidt said she would separate holidays from official dates so that even an appearance of mixing them would not arise. Criticism that the trip had been unnecessary continued.

### Electoral consequences

As the Social Democratic Party of Germany opened its campaign for the [2009 German federal election](/facts/2009-german-federal-election), chancellor candidate Frank-Walter Steinmeier said on 29 July that he and Schmidt had agreed she would stay off his *Kompetenzteam* until the allegations were cleared. Spiegel described the step as a withdrawal she left him to announce. The health place was held open and the team presented without her. Spiegel reported that the affair had pushed the SPD, at the campaign's start, to its worst poll rating in a year; the party already trailed the Christian Democratic Union and the CSU.

The morning the audit appeared, *Focus*, cited by Spiegel and the *Mitteldeutsche Zeitung*, reported party figures ruling out her return even if cleared. The *Tagesspiegel*, citing Steinmeier's circle, said a clear result left no reason to exclude her. He then included her: "The result before us is clear and unambiguous, and with that Ulla Schmidt is part of my team," calling the wait a matter of fairness.

## Later parliamentary career

### Return to the back benches

Schmidt left the Federal Ministry of Health in October 2009, as the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) went into opposition, and remained a member of the Bundestag. In the Aachen city constituency, then Wahlkreis 88, she received 38,523 first votes (29.95 percent), behind Rudolf Henke of the Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU) with 50,703 (39.42 percent), and returned on the North Rhine-Westphalia state list. In the 17th Bundestag she was a full member of the Committee on Culture and the Media and of the Subcommittee on Foreign Cultural and Educational Policy, and a deputy member of the Foreign Affairs Committee and of its Subcommittee on Civilian Crisis Prevention and Networked Security. From February 2010 she was also a member of the [NATO Parliamentary Assembly](/organizations/nato-parliamentary-assembly) and deputy leader of the German delegation. For the 2013 election the seat was Wahlkreis 87 (Aachen I). Henke held it with 54,175 first votes (40.7 percent) to Schmidt's 46,907 (35.3 percent), and she was again elected from the state list.

### Vice-president of the Bundestag

On 22 October 2013, at the constitutive sitting of the 18th Bundestag, Schmidt was elected a vice-president. Against the votes of [Die Linke](/organizations/die-linke) and Alliance 90/The Greens, the house let the CDU/CSU and the SPD name two presidential deputies each, and every other group one. In the secret ballot she received 520 votes in favour, 66 against and 35 abstentions, with five invalid papers among 626 cast, and accepted.

During that term she stayed a full member of the foreign-culture subcommittee and a deputy member of the committees on labour and social affairs, culture and the media, and [foreign affairs](/organizations/foreign-affairs); the parliamentary biography continued to list her as deputy leader of the German delegation to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly. She did not return to the presidium. On 23 October 2017, the day before the 19th Bundestag was to elect its presidium, she and [Christine Lambrecht](/people/christine-lambrecht) withdrew their candidacies after group chair Andrea Nahles and party chair [Martin Schulz](/people/martin-schulz) had backed the outgoing group leader Thomas Oppermann. The SPD group nominated Oppermann with 90 of 146 valid votes, 39 against and 17 abstentions. Her vice-presidency is recorded as running from 2013 to 2017, the end of the 18th electoral term.

### Foreign affairs, culture and departure in 2021

In 2017 Schmidt was again second in Aachen I, with 45,309 first votes (32.5 percent) to Henke's 47,011 (33.7 percent), and entered from tenth place on the SPD state list in North Rhine-Westphalia. In the 19th Bundestag she was a full member, and the SPD's *Obfrau*, of the Subcommittee on Foreign Cultural and Educational Policy, and a deputy member of the Foreign Affairs Committee and the Committee on Culture and the Media. When subcommittee chairs were allocated in April 2018, she told *Der Spiegel* she was shaken that the foreign-culture chair had been left to [the Alternative](/organizations/the-alternative) for Germany, calling that a wrong signal for a committee meant to stand for an open Germany; *Spiegel* reported that the remark also targeted her own group's leadership. A Bundestag interview in June 2019 still identified her as deputy leader of the Bundestag delegation to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly. At the assembly's spring session in Bratislava, from 31 May to 3 June 2019, she presented, as general rapporteur of its Committee on the Civil Dimension of Security, a draft report on the alliance at 70 and on reaffirming its values.

She did not stand in the 2021 federal election. In July 2021 the SPD paper *Vorwärts* wrote that she was leaving after 31 years and quoted her saying she had never regretted a day of the work. Her membership of the 19th Bundestag ended on 26 October 2021.

## Disability advocacy

### Parliamentary disability policy

Schmidt, a teacher in special education, took disability questions into the Bundestag through the offices listed in its biography of her. From November 1998 to January 2001 she was deputy chair of the SPD parliamentary group, responsible for labour and social affairs, women, family and older people, and from 2001 to 2009 minister at the Federal Ministry of Health. She was a vice-president of the Bundestag from 2013 to 2017, and for 2017–2021 the register of members' interests listed her as an honorary member of the supervisory board of Aktion Mensch. She did not stand again in 2021.

On 15 March 2019 she spoke in the chamber after the Federal [Constitutional Court](/organizations/constitutional-court) had held on 29 January 2019 that two exclusions in the Federal Elections Act were unconstitutional: the bar on voting by people for whom a guardian had been appointed in all their affairs, and the bar on offenders confined to a psychiatric hospital after a finding of criminal incapacity. The court recorded that 81,220 people under full guardianship had been excluded from the 2013 Bundestag election. Schmidt said the Bundestag had ratified the [Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities](/facts/convention-on-the-rights-of-persons-with-disabilities) ten years earlier, traced the exclusions to the old law of legal incapacitation, and argued that they conflicted with the convention's right to participation. The same sitting adopted the CDU/CSU and SPD motion "Für die Einführung eines inklusiven Wahlrechts" (Drucksache 19/8261) by 345 votes to none, with 240 abstentions. On 7 June 2019 the Bundesrat approved Bundestag legislation that included help for disabled voters in marking a ballot. In the March debate the Green member [Corinna Rüffer](/people/corinna-ruffer) said Schmidt had spoken as if she represented Lebenshilfe rather than the SPD.

### Chair of the Lebenshilfe

On 22 September 2012 the members' assembly of the Bundesvereinigung Lebenshilfe in Marburg elected Schmidt, then 63 and the SPD deputy from Aachen, federal chair with 89.64 percent of the vote. She succeeded Robert Antretter, a former member of the Bundestag who did not stand again. Delegates in Berlin re-elected her in November 2025.

The association then put its membership at about 135,000. Schmidt said her main tasks would be carrying out the disability-rights convention and inclusion, meaning disabled and non-disabled people learning and living together.

In September 2016 about 400 delegates at Berlin's Kosmos centre confirmed her, then a Bundestag vice-president, for another four years; the association's newspaper reported 80.84 percent. In a KNA interview that month she said the draft Federal Participation Act would disadvantage people with intellectual disabilities—about half a million of some 860,000 recipients of integration assistance—by treating sheltered-workshop employees as incapable of work and by requiring limitations in five of nine areas of life before assistance was granted. Lebenshilfe started a petition and a campaign under the name Teilhabe statt Ausgrenzung.

On 16 October 2021 the Berlin assembly, with no other candidate, confirmed the 72-year-old for four more years. Citing the association, the epd described Lebenshilfe as a self-help, parents' and professional body for people with intellectual impairments and their families, with about 120,000 members. On 15 November 2025 Deutschlandfunk reported that 96 percent of 400 delegates voted for her, again unopposed; the epd put attendance above 400 and her age at 76. The delegates decided to say ordinarily "people with support needs" rather than "people with intellectual disabilities", which self-advocates had called disparaging, while allowing "people with support needs and a cognitive impairment" where a narrower description was needed.

## Personal life and honours

### Family

Ursula Schmidt, known as Ulla Schmidt, was born Ursula Radermacher on 13 June 1949 in Aachen. The Munzinger archive records that she grew up there with a younger sister, as a child of divorced parents, and was raised by her mother, a factory worker. Official notices style her Ursula (Ulla) Schmidt of Aachen, and a 2010 Austrian decree notes that the given name on one decoration was changed from Ursula to Ulla. Her Bundestag biography, which the parliament says rests on members’ own information, records one daughter and does not name a spouse. In January 2001 *[Die Welt](/organizations/die-welt)* described the then 51-year-old Aachen deputy as a single mother of a daughter.

In the week she became health minister, [*Der Spiegel*](/organizations/der-spiegel) revived claims, which she called “erstunken und erlogen”, that her sister Doris Zöller’s Aachen bar “Barbarina”, and a gambling venue, had connected her to the red-light and gambling milieus, and that she was tied to a counterfeit-money case around the Aachen SPD politician Dieter Schinzel. Schmidt said she had only waited tables there about once a week in the early 1970s, as a student and single mother, denied keeping the till or doing business for her sister, and said her only dealing with Schinzel was a guarantee she herself paid. Former senior prosecutor Lothar Karhausen was quoted as saying that nothing blameworthy toward her had been found, and Chancellor Gerhard Schröder told her they would get through it.

### Awards, boards and civic roles

In 2009 the Arbeiterwohlfahrt awarded Schmidt its Marie Juchacz Plaque. A North Rhine-Westphalia laudation on 2 July 2018 called the plaque the organisation’s highest honour and said she had then been in the AWO for about 35 years. In 2010 she received the Grand Decoration of Honour in Gold with Sash for Services to the Republic of Austria (*Großes Goldenes Ehrenzeichen am Bande*). The presidential chancellery’s list, published with a parliamentary answer, enters her as a Bundestag member and former federal minister of health and social security, and notes a newly executed decree after the change of given name. At the 2018 ceremony in Düsseldorf, Finance Minister Lutz Lienenkämper, standing in for Minister-President Armin Laschet, conferred the Order of Merit of North Rhine-Westphalia; she was one of 18 recipients, and the ministerial gazette lists “Ursula (Ulla) Schmidt MdB, Aachen”.

Outside parliament she held several board seats. In June 2011 Berlin’s science senator, Jürgen Zöllner, appointed her to the supervisory board of Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin; Bundestag disclosures show that expert membership ended on 26 March 2020. The same filings record an unpaid supervisory seat at Aktion Mensch and, until 19 June 2019, one at Philips GmbH. Aktion Mensch’s own board page still lists her. She joined the board of the Swiss pharmaceutical company Siegfried Holding AG in 2016 and did not stand for re-election in 2022. Her Bundestag biography, marked as self-reported, also lists membership of Atlantik-Brücke and of the general meeting of the [Goethe-Institut](/organizations/goethe-institut). The 2018 laudation named her, in addition, as chair of the board of trustees of the Hospizstiftung Region Aachen.

## Dated facts

_No published facts on this page yet._

## Methodology

https://factrail.ai/methodology

Canonical: https://factrail.ai/people/ulla-schmidt