Gilles Zeimet, director of the National Audiovisual Centre (CNA), resigned on Wednesday, with Culture Minister Eric Thill informing the relevant parliamentary committee of the decision that afternoon. The announcement came following Left Party MP Marc Baum's publication of a 60-page analysis of temperature and humidity measurements recorded at the Family of Man exhibition in Clervaux, painting a very different picture from the one previously presented to the Chamber.
Thill told the committee that Zeimet had offered his resignation on his own accord at around 1pm. "I took note of it as Minister of Culture", he said. "An hour later I came here to the Culture Committee and have duly informed the Chamber."
For Luxembourg Socialist Workers' Party (LSAP) MP Franz Fayot, a member of the committee, the resignation was far from a surprise. What surprised him, he said, was not that it had happened, but how long the situation had been allowed to drag on.
"We were told things here in the committee and in the Chamber that were misleading at best and wrong at worst", he said, referring in particular to a presentation made by Zeimet on 11 March, in which average values were cited that obscured the true conditions in the exhibition rooms.
Fayot welcomed the departure, pointing to the consistently brief and evasive answers provided by the former director, which he said bore little resemblance to reality. He also reminded that other serious issues surrounding the CNA remain unresolved, including questions of governance and the bullying accusations levelled against Zeimet.
Greens MP Djuna Bernard was equally welcoming of the news. "Given the circumstances and the way things have escalated in recent months, I think it is the only right decision", she said, adding that the resignation offered the CNA a genuine opportunity to find calmer waters under new leadership.
For Left Party MP Marc Baum, the announcement brought a long overdue sigh of relief. "There were a lot of elements, and new ones were added almost every week. The resignation is the only logical consequence", he said.
He also suggested that the minister himself had been placed in an increasingly untenable position, noting that another committee appearance like those of recent months would have been truly unbearable.
Minister Thill also used the committee meeting to retract a statement he had made on RTL's Background programme on 11 April, in which he had claimed that limit values at the Family of Man had only been exceeded for minutes. He acknowledged before the committee that this was not accurate, admitting that he had got caught up in the details, and describing his statement as an open and transparent admission of error.
Both in a previous committee appearance and in his written response to a parliamentary question, the same wording was reused, but what he had meant to convey was that the exceedance had occurred over a short period of time, rather than mere minutes, he said.
What exactly constitutes a short period of time and what the minister had meant by stating that "no lasting exceedance of the conservation-relevant limit values had occurred" still remained unclear. When pressed on how long the exceedances had actually lasted, Thill consistently evaded the question, saying instead that monitoring would now be carried out to establish whether any damage had been caused to the works.
On the analysis published by Baum earlier that day, Thill was similarly evasive. He told the committee that he had only received the document that afternoon, shortly before arriving at the Chamber, and was not prepared to address its contents on the spot.
"We will look at it carefully over the next few days", he said, "and then we will draw the necessary conclusions, both at the CNA and in the ministry."
Notably, the data that Baum used for his analysis had been provided by the ministry itself. This data clearly shows that limit values had been exceeded in various rooms for days, not minutes or any other brief interval.
This same data led RTL, as well as Tageblatt, to the same conclusion on Wednesday afternoon and the previous ,respectively.
Bernard chose to look on the bright side, contentent with the minister's willingness to apologise. "It is not every day that a politician admits to a mistake", she said. "And that is something I give him credit for."
Baum, however, struck a harder tone: "The minister has apologised for what he said on RTL. He was right to do so. I think we can let it pass this time but I think it is the last time."
The Family of Man exhibition is now to be equipped with a more robust monitoring system to ensure conditions within the rooms are properly tracked going forward. As for the CNA's administrative leadership, an interim support committee will take over until a successor for Zeimet is found.
Zeimet, for his part, made his opinion known to journalists, saying that he had carried out his role to the best of his knowledge and conscience, and had kept both the ministry and the Chamber informed accordingly. He acknowledged that in recent weeks, the focus had increasingly shifted to him personally, making it difficult to carry out the CNA's work calmly, objectively, and effectively – particularly at a time when the institution is undergoing an important and necessary restructuring.
It was for this reason, he said, that he drew his personal conclusions, to prevent the institution from being further burdened. He closed by thanking his team for their professionalism and constructive collaboration throughout his time in the role.
