Tuesday, December 21, 2021
Election of the Berlin MPs
Franziska Giffey becomes the first female mayor
The Berlin House of Representatives elects the SPD state chairwoman Giffey as the first woman in the office of governing mayor. Shortly beforehand, the red-green-red government signed the coalition agreement. Giffey and the new Senate face some challenges.
A good twelve weeks after the election to the Berlin House of Representatives, Franziska Giffey was elected mayor of Berlin. The SPD state chairman and former federal family minister replaced her party friend Michael Müller, who had not run after seven years in the Red City Hall and moved to the Bundestag.
Giffey needed at least 74 of the 147 votes of the Berlin MPs for her victory. As Parliament President Dennis Buchner announced, 84 MPs voted for Giffey, 52 against her and two abstained. The coalition of the SPD, the Greens and the Left has a total of 92 members.
With Giffey, Berlin is now getting a governing mayor for the first time – and for the first time since reunification, a city leader from the GDR. However, Giffey is not the first woman to run the city. Because in 1947/1948 the SPD politician Louise Schroeder officiated provisionally as Lord Mayor of post-war Berlin.
Shortly before Giffey was elected, the SPD, the Greens and the Left signed their coalition agreement for the formation of the new state government in the capital. The three parties have been ruling Berlin together since 2016. “The coalition agreement has been signed,” said the Berlin Social Democrats on Twitter. Representatives of the three coalition partners signed the 150-page long paper in the State Library.
Berlin Senate as feminine as never before
Giffey can look back on a steep political career. Within a few years she rose from the education councilor in Berlin’s Neukölln district to the office of district mayor to federal family minister. In May, Giffey resigned as minister in the wake of a plagiarism affair that cost her a doctorate. As the top candidate in the House of Representatives election, Giffey achieved the historically worst result for the Berlin Social Democrats with only 21.4 percent. At the same time, however, she secured the SPD’s election victory over the Greens, CDU, Left, AfD and FDP.
The way to the formation of the new state government has been clear since Friday: the left voted by a majority for the coalition agreement in a two-week membership decision. The capital SPD previously approved the contract at a party congress, as did the Greens. In addition to the head of government, the SPD has four senators, the Greens and the Left three each. With seven women and four men, the Senate is more feminine than ever. In the afternoon, the government team wants to meet for their first meeting.
The government program includes a long list of joint projects. It ranges from the expansion of local public transport to more efforts for climate protection and 20,000 new apartments per year to a more citizen-friendly administration and more video surveillance of places with a high level of crime. Even before the government even started, dealing with a referendum had proven to be a difficult topic.
The majority of Berliners want to expropriate housing groups
At the same time as the Bundestag and House of Representatives elections on September 26, 57.6 percent of voters – more than a million Berliners – voted for the expropriation of housing groups with more than 3,000 apartments in Berlin. They see such socialization in exchange for compensation as a means of stopping the rise in rents.
Red-Green-Red agreed to set up a commission of experts as a consequence: It should examine the prerequisites and options for implementation and submit a recommendation to the Senate after one year on how to proceed. How it goes on is completely open. The SPD is against expropriations, the left is in favor, and the Greens can also imagine them “as a last resort”. With an expropriation law, Berlin would break new legal and political territory again after the rent cap that failed in the Federal Constitutional Court in April.