State Secretary for the Environment
Appointment
After the September 2009 election the CDU/CSU and FDP agreed in their coalition talks to make Reiche parliamentary state secretary at the environment ministry (BMU). The transport ministry's official CV dates the post from 29 October 2009; the English Wikipedia gives 28 October. She had herself sat in the coalition working group on environment, agriculture and consumer protection.
Political context
The second Merkel government took office with a plan to extend the operating lives of Germany's nuclear plants, which the Bundestag approved in autumn 2010. After the Fukushima disaster in March 2011 the coalition reversed course. Renewable expansion, especially rooftop and ground-mounted solar, was rising fast, and with it the cost of feed-in support.
Responsibilities
She served under two ministers: Norbert Röttgen until May 2012 and Peter Altmaier from May 2012. Her internal division of portfolio within the BMU is not documented in an official source consulted for this page. Her parliamentary appearances show that she represented the ministry on renewable-energy legislation.
Major priorities
Political position In the Bundestag she argued that the Renewable Energy Sources Act (EEG) had to evolve into a "Marktfähigkeitsmodell", a model for market readiness, and restated the government's target of 35 per cent renewable electricity by 2020.
Policies
On 9 March 2012, at the first reading of the government's solar amendment (PV-Novelle), she defended cuts to photovoltaic feed-in support. According to the Bundestag's own report, she argued that a mass market such as photovoltaics could not be permanently fed by subsidies and said: "Die Industrie muss sich unabhängig behaupten" ("The industry must hold its own independently").
Initiatives
In May 2011 she took part in the first German–Indian government consultations in Delhi. No other initiatives can be attributed to her personally from the sources reviewed; legislation in this period was led by the minister.
Challenges
The nuclear reversal put the ministry's political leadership in the position of reversing, within a year, a policy it had just enacted. Reiche had long supported longer plant lifetimes and voted for the 2010 extension. On 30 June 2011, in a roll-call vote, she voted for the phase-out of nuclear power by 2022.
Outcomes
The phase-out law passed and the last three plants closed on 15 April 2023. Her term ended with the new Bundestag on 22 October 2013, after which she continued in a caretaker capacity; the Bundestag biography says she held the post until December 2013.
Criticism
Criticism Her highest-profile controversy of the period was not about environmental policy. In August 2012, writing in Bild, she opposed giving civil partnerships equal status with marriage. The Süddeutsche Zeitung described a storm of protest, and she took her Facebook page offline for a time.
Long-term significance
Analysis The BMU years gave her first-hand experience of energy legislation at the moment when cost became its central political problem. Her 2012 argument that solar should stand on its own in the market anticipates, almost word for word, her 2025 case for ending feed-in support for small rooftop systems.