The Union parliamentary group called on Bundestag President Bärbel Bas (SPD) on Thursday to call the traffic light coalition “to order”. The government’s dealings with the Bundestag are “unacceptable”, says a letter from the Parliamentary Managing Director of the Union faction, Thorsten Frei, to the President of the Bundestag. “Even budget law, the royal law of parliament,” is “no longer spared from the chaos of the traffic lights.” It is therefore “urgently necessary” that Bas “personally gets involved” in the events.
Since the Federal Constitutional Court’s ruling on state finances, the CDU/CSU parliamentary group has been pushing “for orderly and serious parliamentary procedures” to ensure constitutional budgets, according to the letter sent to the South German newspaper is present. Every necessary step on this path had to be “laboriously wrested” from the federal government and the coalition factions. The coalition’s approach so far has been “characterized by lack of planning and stubbornness.” A new low point was the discussions on the draft budget financing law in the budget committee and the advisory committees.
Things cannot continue like this, the letter says
Despite the Union faction’s emphatic requests for early information and appropriate procedures, the coalition factions submitted a comprehensive amendment “in a rush” shortly before the start of the budget committee meeting, writes Thorsten Frei. “This new amendment not only replaced the three previous amendments, but also provided for the splitting of the draft budget financing law into two parts.” Given the short amount of time, it was not clear “which parts should remain in the draft law or which parts would be postponed”.
The coalition factions “operate on budgetary policy with their eyes blindfolded,” complains Frei. This would also be shown by the “chaotic conditions” in the meetings of the advisory committees on Thursday morning. In some cases, these committees had “already submitted their votes based on the three outdated amendments; in other cases, the new amendment surprised the MPs in the current session – apparently the members of the coalition factions did not fully know what they were actually voting on.”
Bas’s letter in March was already sharp
Things cannot continue like this, says the letter to the President of the Bundestag. Thorsten Frei points out that Bärbel Bas had already warned the traffic light coalition in an unusually harsh letter in March. “Despite the regular assurances from representatives of the federal government and the coalition factions, a return to orderly processes to the extent necessary is still a long time coming,” Bas complained at the time. However, one should not allow the German Bundestag as the central constitutional body and thus also trust in representative democracy to be weakened.
It is “unfortunately to be noted” that this appeal from the President of the Bundestag “was met with no major effect,” writes Thorsten Frei now. The parliamentary manager also sees his opinion reinforced by a decision by the Federal Constitutional Court. In July, the Karlsruhe judges prohibited the traffic light coalition from passing the heating law in a rush. It also became known on Thursday that the traffic light coalition will no longer be able to pass the 2024 budget this year – and therefore on time – due to their internal differences.