BERLIN: A prominent figure in German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s centre-right party resigned his leadership post on Saturday, party sources said, amid controversy over his use of a surrogate mother in the US despite a ban on the practice in Germany.

“In recent days, I have come to realise that my personal happiness in starting a family with my husband and becoming a father is incompatible with my political office,” Jens Spahn, the chairman of the CDU’s faction in parliament, wrote in a letter to colleagues.

The CDU party is vehemently opposed to surrogate pregnancies, having most recently voted to maintain Germany’s ban at a party congress in February. Merz welcomed Spahn’s resignation, saying that the decision to step down was “right and unavoidable”.

While crediting Spahn with helping the CDU return to power, the chancellor added: “Credibility is the most valuable asset in politics.” Spahn and his husband recently welcomed the child born to the surrogate mother in the United States, with news breaking in the German media earlier this week. The news immediately attracted criticism from within the CDU, including calls for Spahn to resign, as well as charges of hypocrisy from other politicians.

Spahn initially tried to defend himself, saying in a Friday podcast interview with the Bild newspaper that he had “wrestled with myself for a long time, including on the issue of surrogacy” before finally deciding to have a child in that way.

But on Saturday, Spahn told his colleagues the “balancing act between my private decision to have a child through surrogacy and the understandable expectations placed on me as chairman of our parliamentary group has proven more difficult than I had anticipated”. Opposition lawmakers welcomed Spahn’s resignation.

Luigi Pantisano, a leader of the hard-left Die Linke, said that Spahn’s decision to hire a surrogate mother in the US “once again reveals a double standard”.

“The law always applies to ordinary people, but for top politicians, they apparently apply only until they have enough money to go circumvent them abroad,” Pantisano told the Rheinische Post newspaper.

Published in Dawn, July 19th, 2026