Tuesday, October 26, 2021
Nazi settlement in the Bundestag
AfD provokes in the first meeting
The time has come: the new Bundestag will meet for the first time 30 days after the election. And there is another dispute between the AfD and the other parliamentary groups. And it should go on like this.
The first session of the new Bundestag started with a heated debate. The question was who should be the elected President of Parliament in the future. As expected, CDU man Wolfgang Schäuble got this post because he is the longest serving member of the parliament. However, the AfD had applied to elect the oldest parliamentarian by age instead – and that would have been its honorary chairman Alexander Gauland.
The AfD MP Bernd Baumann caused the first excitement of the young legislature in his motivation for the application: He compared the parties in the Bundestag with the Nazis. Because only they would have broken with the tradition that had existed since the Paulskirche parliament (1848) of making the oldest member of parliament the senior president. “Should that be your role model?” Baumann asked the group. “It’s a cheek”, replied SPD man Carsten Schneider. Michael Grosse-Brömer from the CDU said that Gauland had already disqualified himself by calling “the darkest chapter in German history” fly shit “”. The Nazi era was also meant.
A similar debate is likely to take place in the election of the vice-presidents of the Bundestag President-elect Bärbel Bas from the SPD. Usually each parliamentary group can send a deputy. However, he or she must be elected by the majority. And the other parties did not participate – because they consider the AfD to be too right, not suitable.
AfD candidate could fail again
In the past 19th electoral term, the AfD put six of its members up for election for the post of Vice President. They all failed in three ballots each because the MPs from the other parliamentary groups refused to approve them. Now the right-wing populists are sending the new MP Michael Kaufmann into the race, who has experience as Vice President of the Thuringian State Parliament.
But even this is unlikely to save him from losing the vote. “Personally, I will not vote for a member from one of the most radical state associations of the AfD,” said Carsten Schneider, the first parliamentary manager of the SPD parliamentary group, who himself came from Thuringia, to the editorial network in Germany.
The next dispute is already imminent and also has to do with the AfD. The FDP no longer wants to sit next to the right-wing populists and wants to swap places with the Union. But what she doesn’t want. The Bundestag will be preoccupied with the question for a while. It should be discussed in the council of elders.