fact finder
Status: 18.09.2021 12:40 a.m.
The AfD claims that daily News reported incorrectly about the Bundestag vote on flood aid, according to which the AfD was the only party not to agree. There were several stages in the coordination process.
On Tuesday, the Bundestag voted on a fund worth 30 billion euros for the victims of the flood disaster in North Rhine-Westphalia and Rhineland-Palatinate in mid-July. the daily News at 8 p.m. reported in a request to speak and named the result of the vote: All parties except the AfD voted in favor.
The AfD parliamentary group threw the daily News thereupon false reporting. MPs posted a short video in which AfD parliamentary group members as well as other MPs can be seen raising their hands in approval and Bundestag Vice President Petra Pau stated: “The remaining parts of the law have been unanimously adopted.”
Rejection and abstention
Here you have to distinguish between different stages of the coordination process. the daily News-Message referred to the decisive third reading in the Bundestag, in which the reconstruction aid was approved. In the final third vote, the MPs were asked – as usual – to indicate their voting behavior by standing up.
Then Bundestag Vice-President Pau stated: “The bill is with the votes of the coalition, the FDP faction, the faction Die Linke and the faction Bündnis90 / Die Grünen against the votes of two MPs of the AfD faction with abstention of the other members of the AfD- Group adopted. ”
This is documented in the recording of the 239th session of the Bundestag, available in the Bundestag’s media library, which here is linked. The final vote after the third reading can be seen at the end from timecode 6:15:50 at 3:16 p.m. in the clock shown at the top right.
The first editor-in-chief of ARD-aktuell, Marcus Bornheim, explains, “that different parliamentary groups voted differently on different parts of the law in the previous readings. In this respect, the message is in the daily News not wrong, but could just give an improper impression.
Criticism of the link with the Infection Protection Act
On the website of the AfD parliamentary group, parliamentary group leader Alice Weidel said on September 8: “During yesterday’s Bundestag session, like all other parliamentary groups, our group voted in favor of flood aid – but we voted for the flood aid in a scandalous way had been mixed up with the Infection Protection Act. ”
In addition, Bernd Baumann, the first parliamentary managing director of the AfD parliamentary group, stated that the federal government had “deliberately put the two completely different topics of flood aid and the amendment to the Infection Protection Act into one package in order to bring the MPs into a conscience.” The AfD parliamentary group was in favor of flood aid, but “decided against renewed restrictions on fundamental rights through further tightening of the Infection Protection Act”.
Omnibus proceedings under criticism
According to the scientific service of the Bundestag, the aim of this so-called omnibus procedure is to collect several amendments with a common goal and bring them to a vote. As a result, a broad public discussion is prevented, which is regularly criticized by the opposition factions in the Bundestag, according to a paper from 2020.
In the literature, too, amendments “that regulate a new issue going beyond the previous content and that do not have a connection with the actual subject matter of the original draft law are criticized.” The scientific service states that the omnibus procedure is constitutionally permissible under consideration of limits and executes it.
Linking the flood aid with the Infection Protection Act also led to criticism from the entire opposition. FDP deputy Wolfgang Kubicki stated, for example, that the FDP would not have approved the amendment to the Infection Protection Act on its own. In a personal statement, he wrote that the coalition wanted to put the opposition under moral pressure. This testifies to the loss of moral standards. In a similar way, the Left Party, the Greens and the AfD expressed criticism of the procedure.
The opposition parties argued differently with regard to the changes to the Infection Protection Act. Accordingly, the opposition parties voted no in an initial vote on the pandemic measures. The excerpt from the Bundestag session on September 7th, which can be seen in the video posted by the AfD MPs, shows the vote on the legislative changes only on flood relief. This was accepted unanimously.
In the vote after the final third reading, members of the coalition, the FDP faction, the Die Linke faction and the Bündnis90 / Die Grünen faction stood up to show their approval. Two AfD MPs voted against it, the other AfD MPs present abstained, as Vice President Pau subsequently determined.