In the struggle for important prestige positions in the Bundestag, the AfD parliamentary group suffered three defeats on Wednesday. The parliamentary group’s proposals for the chairmanship of the Bundestag committees for home affairs, health and development fell through in a secret ballot. The Interior Committee rejected the MP Martin Hess, nominated by the AfD parliamentary group, as chairman in the afternoon by a large majority. This is what participants of the meeting report. The AfD top confirmed the defeat.
There had previously also been a secret election in the Health Committee and in the Committee on Development Cooperation. In the health committee, the MP Jörg Schneider, nominated for the chairmanship of the AfD parliamentary group, fell through, as did the AfD MP Dietmar Friedhoff in the development committee.
It is true that the AfD had secured the right to propose the important posts in all three cases in a preliminary procedure. But in the other parliamentary groups, resistance to the election of committee chairmen from the ranks of the AfD in important parliamentary bodies had recently grown. The doubts in the Interior Committee were particularly great. There, the other groups considered the election of an AfD man to head the body that controls the security authorities as a security risk.
The Union, SPD, FDP, Greens and Linke saw the occupation in the health committee as critically as in the interior committee. On the subject of health, the AfD had recently spoken out against corona protective measures again and again. Authorities see state associations of the AfD in East Germany as the driving force behind the radicalization of protests against protective measures such as vaccination.
Committees and their chairmen are important to Parliament
The committee chairmen of the boards have important functions. You lead the meetings, set the agenda and are supposed to find compromises on difficult issues. The AfD, however, had only announced legal steps against the facility-related vaccination obligation pursued by the Bundestag, for example for old people’s homes, on Tuesday.
In addition to Schneider, the AfD also sends MPs Martin Sichert, Christina Baum, Thomas Dietz and Kay-Uwe Ziegler to the committee. Above all, Sichert and Baum had already attracted strong criticism of Corona measures in the first sessions of the Bundestag. Sichert declared that the government wanted to use 2G and 3G to educate citizens with “massive pressure to become willing subjects”. His group colleague Christina Baum went even further and accused the government of fearmaking, terror, arbitrariness and “slavery of the people”.
Meanwhile, another personality became known. According to information from faction trips, the AfD wants to send retired Bundeswehr General Joachim Wundrak to the parliamentary body that controls the secret services. Wundrak retired in 2018 as a three-star general in the Air Force and entered the Bundestag for the first time in the election in September. The 66-year-old is included in the moderate wing of the party. Together with the moderate MP Joana Cotar, he had applied for his party’s top candidate for the federal election campaign, but was defeated by the duo Tino Chrupalla and Alice Weidel.
Roman Reusch, who was a member of the parliamentary control committee in the previous electoral term, had decided not to run for the Bundestag again in the September election.
The whole AfD could be classified as a suspected right-wing extremist
It has long been controversial in the other parliamentary groups whether the AfD should move into the committee again. It monitors the Federal Intelligence Service (BND), the Military Counter-Intelligence Service (MAD) and the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV). The MPs meet regularly in strict secrecy in a tap-proof room.
Because the Office for the Protection of the Constitution could classify the entire AfD as a suspected right-wing extremist case in the coming year, many MPs consider an AfD participation in the body to be problematic. The officially disbanded party stream “wing” is already being observed by the protection of the constitution as a right-wing extremist endeavor with intelligence means. The youth organization Junge Alternative has classified the constitution protection as a suspected case in the right-wing extremist spectrum.