Carolina Schmidt

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Carolina Schmidt

María Carolina Schmidt Zaldívar (born September 9, 1967 in Santiago de Chile ) is a Chilean manager and non-party politician. She is the incumbent Environment Minister of Chile .

Life

Carolina Schmidt is a daughter of the building contractor and economic functionary Alfredo Schmidt (* 1940). She comes from a well-known upper-class family in Santiago de Chile and is related to several well-known politicians, most of whom were Christian Democrats . She studied economics at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile (PUC) and then completed a postgraduate degree in marketing at New York University . She worked in the fashion industry in London and Florence for various companies of the Chilean textile entrepreneur Alfonso Swett (* 1943), with whose son she had studied at the PUC. In 2000 she took over as editor-in-chief of the ailing Chilean business magazine Capital , which belonged to the influential Chilean media entrepreneur Guillermo Luksic (1956–2013). In 2010, she took over the management of the food division of the CCU brewery group as managing director .

While the center-left coalition was still in office, she was accepted into a government children's council set up by Chilean President Michelle Bachelet . When the new President Sebastián Piñera took office in March 2010, she was appointed to the government as head of the Chilean women's agency Sernam (which was subordinate to the then Ministry of Planning) with the rank of Minister of State . A few months later, media coverage sparked her appeal to young people to refrain from sexual activity until marriage . Her term of office included the extension of maternity leave from three to six months, the passing of a law against femicide and the introduction of joint parental responsibility for separated parents. Her campaign against violence against women temporarily made her one of the most popular politicians in Chile. At the end of 2011, she publicly criticized her President Sebastián Piñera after he told a sexist joke at a preparatory summit meeting for the establishment of the Pacific Alliance in Mérida (Mexico) . On April 22, 2013, she succeeded the dismissed Minister of Education, Harald Beyer, in the first Piñera cabinet . In this office she achieved a constitutional reform that stipulated free kindergarten education from the age of three and compulsory pre- schooling. In the dispute that broke out among her predecessor as to whether the period of the military dictatorship after the coup in Chile in 1973 should be referred to in Chilean school books as “dictatorship” (dictadura) or as “military regime” (régimen militar) , she advocated the parallel use of both terms. She remained education minister until the change of government in spring 2014 and then went back to business. In addition, after leaving the government, she took over the economic management of the Municipal Theater of Santiago de Chile.

From July 2015, she and her family spent a sabbatical year in Barcelona , Spain . After her return to Chile, in July 2017 she took over the management of the important media group Copesa , which publishes, among other things, the second largest daily newspaper in the country La Tercera , the conservative political magazine Qué pasa and the leading Chilean women's magazine Paula . With Piñera's renewed presidency in 2018, she was entrusted with the leadership of the Chilean Ministry of the Environment in his second cabinet . In March 2019, she had herself filmed while showering with the actor Fernando Godoy (* 1983) for a campaign by the ministry to combat water scarcity in Chile, aggravated by climate change . The high-profile video, which was criticized and satirically imitated by Greenpeace , was intended to urge citizens not to shower for more than three minutes to save water.

On January 21, 2019, Carolina Schmidt was nominated as acting Environment Minister of Chile for the presidency of the UN Climate Change Conference 2019 (COP 25) planned in Santiago de Chile in December of the same year . In her function as President-elect, she informed the United Nations on October 30 that the host country was canceled due to the anti-government protests in Chile 2019 that escalated across the country in October . In the cabinet reshuffle a few days earlier, with which Sebastián Piñera tried to meet the demonstrators' demands, Schmidt retained her post as Environment Minister after she had offered the President, like all ministers, to resign on October 27. At the end of November, she traveled to Madrid , the alternate location for the summit, and took over the chairmanship of the World Climate Conference on December 2, 2019. Speaking to the delegates, she said that people should be the focus of climate policy.

Schmidt is assigned to Opus Dei and belongs to the education minister Joaquín Lavín , who resigned in 2011 and who was Schmidt's ministerial superior as women's representative until spring 2013, and the long-standing senator and multiple UDI boss Hernán Larraín , who has been Minister of Justice since 2018 and Schmidt's cabinet colleague is one of the best-known members and exponents of the organization in the Piñera administration.

Carolina Schmidt is married to lawyer Gonzalo Molina and has three children.

Web links

Commons : Carolina Schmidt  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f Carlos Vergara: Carolina Schmidt, la nueva cara independiente de la política chilena. In: La Nación , July 2, 2013, accessed March 26, 2019 (Spanish).
  2. ↑ a b c Profile on the website of the Chilean government , accessed in March 2019 (Spanish).
  3. ^ Mónika Szente-Varga: El golpe de estado en Chile según la prensa en Hungría y en España. In: Ferenc Fischer, Domingo Lilón, Máté Deák: A 40 años del Golpe de Estado en Chile. América Latina y Europa central y oriental durante la Guerra Fría (= Iberoamericana Quinqueecclesiensis , Volume 12). Ibero-American Center of the University of Pécs , Pecs 2014, pp. 55–66 (here: p. 60).
  4. ↑ El año de sabático Carolina Schmidt: renuncia al Teatro del Lago y deja directorio de Enersis para irse a Barcelona. In: El Mostrador , June 25, 2015, accessed November 9, 2019 (Spanish).
  5. ↑ Greenpeace responde con parodia a video protagonizado por la ministra Schmidt en relación con el cuidado del agua. In: El Mostrador , March 25, 2019, accessed on the same day (Spanish).
  6. ↑ Carolina Schmidt, President-designate for COP 25th message on the website of the UNFCCC , April 2, 2019, accessed on November 9, 2019 (English).
  7. ↑ Chile pulls out of hosting Cop25 climate talks amid civil unrest. In: Climate Home News , October 30, 2019, accessed November 9, 2019.
  8. ^ Así quedó conformado el nuevo Gabinete del Presidente Sebastián Piñera. In: Meganoticias , October 28, 2019, accessed November 9, 2019 (Spanish).
  9. ^ Giselle Saure: Ministra Schmidt a la COP25: “Gobierno tiene compromiso irrestricto con DDHH”. In: La Nación , November 29, 2019, accessed December 3, 2019 (Spanish).
  10. ^ Climate summit in Madrid: Chile takes over the chairmanship. In: BR24 , December 2, 2019, accessed on December 3, 2019.
  11. ^ Chile: an Opus Dei convent or a country on the Liberal path? In: MercoPress , January 6, 2011, accessed March 26, 2019.
personal data
SURNAME Schmidt, Carolina
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Schmidt Zaldívar, María Carolina
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Chilean politician
DATE OF BIRTH September 9, 1967
PLACE OF BIRTH Santiago de Chile