Duty to reason or freedom also to unreason? With all due respect for the other opinion, the Bundestag does not find a consensus on compulsory vaccination. Still, a decision has to be made. The direction in which this is going is already indicated.
If a group has an important issue to decide but has completely different opinions, then you talk to each other. The German Bundestag did the same when it came to compulsory vaccination. The exchange lasted four hours, in the end all arguments had been put forward – and it became clear that the introduction of compulsory vaccination is more likely.
Because all the speakers of the SPD were in favor of it, and even the Union representatives were not categorically against it. The Greens, the Left and even the FDP also have supporters. The only thing that is unclear is what this compulsory vaccination should look like in concrete terms.
There is agreement among most factions that vaccination is the means to overcome the pandemic. It is disputed, however, whether compulsory vaccination would be such a fundamental encroachment on fundamental rights that it would be better to do without it – or whether this waiver interferes so much with the fundamental rights of vulnerable groups that compulsory vaccination would be appropriate. “Every decision, including those against it, has consequences,” says SPD parliamentary group leader Dagmar Schmidt.
Kubicki is for vaccination – but against compulsory vaccination
On the other hand, FDP roughneck and party leader Wolfgang Kubicki is clear. He reports that the vaccination was “an enormously liberating feeling” for him. Nevertheless, he rejects compulsory vaccination: “In any case, I don’t want the majority to determine for the minority what is to be considered reasonable and what the majority thinks you have to do in order to show solidarity.”
The Bundestag Vice President also gets applause from the AfD, but their position is actually different. In any case, the debate is the easiest for her: she rejects all measures anyway. AfD parliamentary group leader Alice Weidel takes part in the orientation debate with standard maximum rhetoric: “Our country is on the threshold of an unprecedented fall from grace”, the introduction of compulsory vaccination would be “an elementary breach of civilization” and “an authoritarian rampage against the foundations of our basic democratic order” – that she says two days after an actual killing spree at the University of Heidelberg.
The Union accuses Scholz of refusing to work
The Union has a completely different special role in this debate. Your parliamentary group leadership has successfully prevented the deputies from the CDU and CSU from supporting one of the three group motions from the ranks of the traffic light. She wants to present a “differentiated proposal” that will contribute to pacifying the debate, a “compromise solution,” as the health policy spokesman for the Union faction, Tino Sorge, said in the morning on ntv’s “early start”.
In the Bundestag, CDU politicians worried that it was necessary to agree on how compulsory vaccination could be designed. Like all Union speakers after him, Sorge sharply criticizes the fact that a catalog of questions that the Union sent to the Chancellery in December was only answered briefly the day before. The Union has also repeatedly criticized the lack of leadership by Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who is present but does not take part in the debate. The CSU MP Andrea Lindholz says the government “refuses to work, it does not submit its own draft”.
And without exception, all Union speakers are calling for a vaccination register, without which the introduction of compulsory vaccination would be pointless. As the only SPD deputy, this is also how parliamentary group board member Martina Stamm-Fibich sees it. Federal Health Minister Karl Lauterbach, who expressly does not speak as a minister but as a member of parliament, rejects this request because he believes it would take too long. “We must act!” Says the SPD minister.
In addition to Lauterbach, only one other member of the cabinet, Minister of Justice Marco Buschmann from the FDP, also speaks “not in an official capacity”. He does not commit himself, but tends towards the motion of a group of MPs around his party friend Andrew Ullmann, which provides for compulsory vaccination for over 50-year-olds. “What needs to be done is protecting the public health system, defending the intensive care unit and the normal ward from overload,” says Buschmann. In any case, “the milder option” must be chosen to achieve this goal.
The speakers, who call for vaccinations to be compulsory for all adults, do not believe that this variant is sufficient. The FDP MP Katrin Helling-Plahr quotes Hinnerk Wißmann from Münster, who said that compulsory vaccination is the milder means “if the alternative is to abolish the free state in lockdown endless loops”. She has joined the motion for compulsory vaccination from the age of 18.
Gysi is against compulsory vaccination
In fact, the FDP, Left and Greens offer the greatest variety. The Left MP Kathrin Vogler, for example, says that compulsory vaccination can only be “the ultima ratio”, but also “mandatory”. Her parliamentary colleague Gregor Gysi rejects compulsory vaccination. Instead, politicians “must give a lot more thought to how trust can be established”.
The Green Paula Piechotta, on the other hand, says that her state of Saxony has by far the worst vaccination rate and the most deaths per capita, “just ahead of Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia”. But no one can say whether mandatory vaccination will result in the pacification of society that its advocates hope for or whether it will result in even more radicalization. She advocates mandatory vaccination advice from the age of 18 and vaccination from the age of 50. With this, her application group is trying to “minimize the social side effects that this drug can have with vaccination”.
Piechotta’s parliamentary colleague Stephanie Aeffner, in turn, asks who is actually talking about the right to physical integrity of people who have previous illnesses, from their families, some of whom have been living in isolation for two years. “What about their right to participation and education?” Ricarda Lang, who will probably be elected the new Green Party chairwoman next weekend, argues in a similar way that compulsory vaccination has “a positive balance of freedom” and that it “protects our freedom”.
“We also want the freedom to be unreasonable,” says SPD parliamentary group leader Dirk Wiese, who co-initiated the application for compulsory vaccination from the age of 18, but the freedom of the many is necessary for this. “Fundamental rights also protect unreasonableness,” says Green Helge Limburg, who generally rejects compulsory vaccination. The Bundestag oscillates between these poles.
In the end, this unusually long and unusually intensive debate seems a bit like a therapy session: everyone gets rid of what they want to say about compulsory vaccination. The supporters of compulsory vaccination, the opponents, the angry, those in solidarity, the thoughtful and also the Union. For the CDU and CSU, compulsory vaccination is a welcome topic: you can accuse the Chancellor of a lack of leadership, you can at the same time clearly differentiate yourself from the AfD and you can show that you hold together as a group. All she has to do now is present her compromise proposal.