The opening of a regional parliament doesn’t usually make for edge-of-the-seat politics. But in the German state of Thuringia, the first session of newly elected MPs descended into such unsavoury chaos that some commentators now fear for German democracy itself.
A few weeks ago, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) won the Thuringian parliamentary election, making it the first significant far-right victory in Germany since the Nazis. All other political parties agreed to uphold their cordon sanitaire around the AfD, but the first parliamentary session on Thursday showed that the democratic system isn’t designed to isolate the election winner.
Picture Corbyn and Braverman drafting a history curriculum together for an idea of how difficult this will be
What was supposed to happen is this: the oldest MP acts as honorary president of the new parliament until the actual president is elected. The strongest party nominates a candidate for parliamentary president. The honorary president then opens parliament, whose first act is to vote for or against the nominee to become president. Should this person not get a majority, other candidates can be nominated by other parties. Once the president is in place, parliament can start working.
What actually happened is this: The oldest MP is an AfD man, the 73-year-old Jürgen Treutler. As the strongest party, the AfD nominated their MP Wiebke Muhsal for president. Instead of voting for or against her, the other parties wanted to make it their first parliamentary act to change procure so that they could name their own candidate, Thadäus König from the conservative CDU. But procedure can’t be changed until the honorary president opens parliament officially, which Treutler refused to do.
The result was an undignified spectacle. Treutler was only supposed to say a few formal words but filibustered his way through the entire session instead of opening parliament. As he carried on talking, MPs from the other parties tried to interrupt him. As acting president, Treutler called them to order and had their microphones switched off. His opponents in turn started booing and shouting things like ‘What you’re doing amounts to a putsch!’ and ‘you’re damaging democracy!’ The session ended in complete chaos and the constitutional court was called to end the stalemate.
The matter has now been resolved. The courts decided that a majority of MPs can change procedure even before a new president takes office. Parliament got back together on Saturday and elected the conservative candidate. A collective sigh of relief went through the press. ‘The chaos is over!’ announced Europe’s biggest tabloid Bild.
But the conundrum behind the chaos is far from over. What happened on Thursday gave Germany a flavour of the bitter tug-of-war over parliamentary dominance that will follow recent AfD successes in the ballot box.
In Thuringia, the far-right party now holds 32 out of 88 seats. In neighburing Saxony it’s 40 out of 120. In Brandenburg, the state that encircles Berlin, they hold 30 out of 88 seats. That may not be enough for the AfD to govern alone, but it is too much to ignore them, and they know it.
In Germany’s federal system, the states hold a lot of power. Important areas like education, culture, policing and transport are largely devolved. Thuringia, Saxony and Brandenburg are now in a position where parties from the far-left to the centre-right will have to agree to pass laws around the AfD. Picture Jeremy Corbyn and Suella Braverman drafting a history curriculum together and you get an idea of how difficult this will be.
German commentators fully appreciate the dilemma. But many see the solution not in thinking about what voters want and how this can best be achieved, but in banning the AfD as a political party. Since the debacle in the Thuringian parliamentary session on Thursday, many politicians and public figures have called for the election winner to be eliminated by the courts – all in the name of democracy.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the loudest calls for an AfD ban have come from the most aggrieved election losers. Georg Maier, a member of Olaf Scholz’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) and interior minister of Thuringia under the last administration, argued on social media that the ‘incidents in the Thuringian parliament have shown that the AfD is acting against the parliamentary system in an aggressive, belligerent way. I think this this means that the preconditions for the process towards a party ban are fulfilled’.
Maier’s party now only holds 6 seats in Thuringia and is trailing in third place in national polls after the AfD and the conservatives. An SPD drive towards banning the party that won the regional elections is unlikely to strengthen people’s trust in parliamentary democracy, a system whose peaceful transition of power hinges on the principle of losers’ consent.
Given Germany’s Nazi past, which is still just about within living memory, it’s entirely understandable that people worry about the rise of a far-right party. But using the legal system and parliamentary procedure to circumvent the wishes of vast swathes of the electorate is not the way to strengthen the country’s post-war democracy.
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