7 Mar 2021
BERLIN (AP) – A lawmaker with German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s party said Sunday he will give up his seat in parliament and leave politics after it emerged that his company profited from deals to procure masks early in the pandemic drawing sharp criticism in an election year.
Nikolas Loebel, a backbench lawmaker with Merkel’s centre-right Christian Democratic Union, was blasted by members of his own party and opponents after it emerged Friday that a company he runs earned commissions of 250,000 euros ($298,000) from brokering contracts to buy masks. Saying that he should have been “more sensitive,” Loebel admitted that he had made a mistake and gave up his seat on parliament’s foreign affairs committee.
The U.S. recorded a full week with fewer than 70,000 daily Covid-19 cases for the first time since mid-October, though President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser said the current daily caseload remains “very high.”
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Sunday 7 March 2021 - 12:26pm
File: German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Bernd von Jutrczenka / Pool / AFP
Bernd von Jutrczenka / Pool / AFP
BERLIN - Support for German Chancellor Angela Merkel s conservative bloc hit a one-year low on Sunday, a key survey showed, hammered by growing anger over a sluggish vaccine rollout and a mask-procurement scandal.
Merkel s CDU/CSU bloc fell to 32 percent in a survey carried out by the Kantar institute for Bild newspaper, a two-percent drop on last week that pushes Germany s biggest political force to its lowest level since March 2020. There are many reasons for the decline, and they all have to do with the pandemic, said Bild.