The latest cabinet reshuffle following Carole Dieschbourg’s resignation as minister for environment, climate and sustainable development has thrown up another surprise nominee. Just as hardly anyone had Yuriko Backes on their radar to replace Pierre Gramegna as finance minister in January, so Joëlle Welfring’s nomination by Déi Gréng as the new minister for the environment came completely out of the blue.

Not that Welfring, who was not even a member of the green party until this week, is unfamiliar with the challenge she faces. At the beginning of April she was appointed director of the environment administration as the successor to Robert Schmit. She had served as deputy director since August 2014 and was said to have impressed Dieschbourg, who had confidence in her know-how and technical ability.

Before that, Welfring had been director of business development at the Henri Tudor public research centre (which was later subsumed into Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology) where she developed links with the business world. “I tried to introduce environmental innovation with businesses, trades as well as larger companies,” Welfring said during an interview on RTL Luxembourg television on Wednesday evening

Early interest in environmental issues

Her passion for environmental issues started as a child. She told RTL on Wednesday evening that images of environmental disasters and seabirds covered in oil had left a “deep impression” on her as a child.  As a youngster Welfring says she was “an activist for the protection of the environment,” she told our sister publication Paperjam, and she was again “on the streets some time ago during the climate marches.” In Esch, where she lives, she also “tries to live ecology on a daily basis as much as possible.”

Political career

But her new role in government is a completely different kettle of fish. Welfring is about to have the spotlight shine on her as never before. “I am aware that this is a new chapter for me, a new job,” she told our sister publication Paperjam. “It’s true that I perhaps do not know the party political and political context so well,” she told RTL. “But my goal is to really get into those issues now and put all my energy into making progress on them.” There is little doubt that she is fully briefed on the details of the legislation that is currently being worked on including the waste packaging law that was passed in parliament on Wednesday afternoon and transcribing the EU directive on drinking water.

She says she was given a couple of days to decide whether to accept the offer by Déi Gréng to step in as Dieschbourg’s successor and that it was only after receiving the support of her family--she is married with two children aged eight and ten--that she took the plunge.

Her future will be in politics, as she says it is “unimaginable that I will go back to the administration.” That means she will, for the first time in her life, be standing as a candidate for Déi Gréng in the southern constituency at the parliamentary elections in October next year.