FRANKFURT, GERMANY (AP) – Voters in Frankfurt have removed the city’s mayor who is on trial in a corruption case.
Authorities said 95.1 per cent of those who turned out voted to recall a member of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s centre-left Social Democrats who has been mayor for 10 years, Peter Feldmann.
Frankfurt prosecutors in March charged Feldmann with exercising undue advantage. They alleged that his partner earned an unreasonably high salary as the head of a daycare facility for children run by an organisation that helped raise funds during his 2018 re-election campaign, and that he planned to “sympathetically consider” the organisation’s interests in return.
His trial opened last month.
He ignored calls to resign in recent months, including from his own party.
He said he would step down in January; the city council voted to remove him. Feldmann ignored a deadline to accept that decision, which set up Sunday’s referendum.
