The Mayor Who Was Voted Out - Römer
On 6 November 2022, 95.1 percent of voters removed Mayor Peter Feldmann from the city hall that has governed Frankfurt since 1405, and seven weeks later a court convicted him of accepting favors from a welfare charity that had given his later wife a lavish job and a company car.
Sobre este lugar
With its three stepped gables, its neogothic balcony and the Fountain of Justice in front, the Römer is the postcard face of Frankfurt: city hall since the council bought the house Zum Römer on 11 March 1405, and home of the Kaisersaal, where newly crowned emperors once feasted beneath what are today 52 imperial portraits. In 2022 this building became the stage for the fall of its own mayor. Peter Feldmann, Lord Mayor since 2012, was charged with accepting undue advantages from the AWO welfare association, which had hired his later wife in 2015 to run a new daycare center with an above scale salary and a company car, and one of whose officials had collected about 6,000 euros for his 2018 campaign. When he snatched the Europa League trophy from Eintracht's coach and captain inside the Römer in May 2022, the city's patience ran out. The council voted here for a recall, and on 6 November 2022 more than 200,000 Frankfurters, 95.1 percent of those voting, threw him out of office, the first such removal in the city's history. A court convicted him on 23 December 2022, and the verdict has been final since October 2023. Justitia, standing on the fountain without a blindfold, has watched all of it with her eyes wide open.
Datos clave
- 95.1 percent — Share of votes for removing Mayor Peter Feldmann in the recall of 6 November 2022, cast by 201,825 Frankfurters on a turnout of 41.9 percent.
- 21000 euros — Feldmann's fine for two counts of accepting undue advantages: 120 daily rates of 175 euros, plus 5,989 euros confiscated by the court.
- 52 emperor portraits — Rulers from Charlemagne to Francis II gaze down from the walls of the Kaisersaal, the hall where coronation banquets were held.