Wednesday, December 8th, 2021
“Security scandal”
Criticism of traffic lights: AfD will head the interior committee in the future
The AfD secured the chairmanship of two important bodies in the Bundestag with the Home Affairs Committee and the Health Committee – a scandal, believes the opposition. The CSU and the left accuse the traffic light parties of having left the chairmanship of the AfD frivolously.
The fact that the AfD will be allowed to chair the Bundestag’s interior committee in the future has met with sharp criticism from the opposition. “It is a security scandal that the traffic light is leaving this central office to a party that is riddled with extremists,” said CSU MP Andrea Lindholz, who headed the committee in the previous election period, on Tuesday. “Of all things, the AfD, half of which is monitored by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, is to lead the parliamentary control of the security authorities in the future – the goat is turned into a gardener,” she added.
CSU regional group leader Alexander Dobrindt said: “It is a clear failure of the other parliamentary groups to allow this.” The domestic politician Martina Renner from the Left said: “The AfD represents a security risk.” That someone from the AfD takes over the chairmanship of this important committee must therefore be prevented.
The chairman posts in the committees are assigned according to the size of the parliamentary groups. This happens in several rounds, whereby the largest fraction is always allowed to access, then the second largest, the third largest and so on. This is followed by further rounds according to the same pattern. The largest opposition faction – now the CDU / CSU – traditionally has the chair of the budget committee. Before the AfD, the SPD, Greens and FDP were still on the train in the first round.
Traffic light parties could have prevented the AfD chairmanship
Of course, the AfD is also entitled to committee chairs, said Dobrindt. However, he made it clear that it should not be the chair of the sensitive and important Interior Committee. He advised to ask why the traffic light parliamentary groups did not take the chairmanship of the Interior Committee in the first access round. “The traffic light groups could have prevented that,” he told the “Spiegel” on Tuesday. In addition to the chairmanship in the interior, the AfD has also taken over the chairmanship in the Committee on Development Cooperation and the Health Committee, which is also of great importance in the current pandemic.
Britta Haßelmann, the new leader of the Green Group, said that the Greens “pulled” the chairmanship of the European Committee when they had their first right of access. She justified this in terms of content, for example with the implementation of the planned EU climate package, the issue of flight and asylum and a common foreign policy. There were many reasons for choosing the European Committee. She did not respond to the criticism that the AfD took over the chairmanship of the Interior Committee. Former parliamentary group leader Anton Hofreiter is under discussion as chairman of the European Committee. He had missed out on the distribution of cabinet posts.
The Union’s allegations against the traffic light parties were rejected by the SPD parliamentary group. “If the CDU and CSU are said to be so important to domestic policy, why have they not announced the right to nominate a chairman in the Interior Committee?”, Said a parliamentary group spokesman for “Spiegel” on Tuesday.
It is not yet clear who the AfD has in view from among its ranks for the chairmanship of the Interior Committee. The decision could be made next Friday. According to information from parliamentary groups, the Berlin MP Gottfried Curio is under discussion. In the past few years he had caused indignant reactions from MPs from other parliamentary groups with numerous speeches in plenary – among other things with the sentence “A one-two-way pass that has become a rule undermines the state and democracy. We do not want that.” During the Nazi dictatorship, “degenerate art” was a propaganda term for art that did not correspond to the ideal of the National Socialists.