The parties position themselves for the Bundestag election. Follow all developments in the news blog.
The CDU has asked the SPD to forego a controversial election campaign spot. “The best thing now would be for everyone not to turn this into a major debate in the election campaign, but simply to withdraw this film,” said CDU General Secretary Paul Ziemiak in Berlin on Monday. One should “no longer misuse a religious creed in order to campaign against others.”
The trigger is an SPD election spot in which one CDU politician after the other emerges from a matryoshka doll. “Whoever votes for Armin Laschet and the CDU, votes …” says one voice. To the doll with the likeness of CDU economic politician Friedrich Merz, the voice continues “… a policy that makes rich richer and poor poorer”. For the doll with the face of the former President of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Hans-Georg Maaßen, the sentence is supplemented with “… candidates who push the CDU to the right margin”.
Next comes a doll with the likeness of the Düsseldorf State Chancellor and Laschet intimate Nathanael Liminski. Here the sentence is supplemented with “… arch-Catholic Laschet confidants for whom sex before marriage is a taboo”. This alludes to a statement made by the avowed Catholic, which he justified as a “personal decision” on the ARD program “Maischberger” in 2007. Liminski was still a student at the time. In the program he also spoke out “against any kind of artificial contraception”.
Ziemiak said: “We imagined the SPD’s commitment to a fair election campaign to be different.” Apparently it is a “new style of the SPD”. Her top candidate Olaf Scholz now has to explain “whether he wants to continue to abuse his religious affiliation, his affiliation with the Catholic faith, for a campaign in the election campaign”. The film also caused great outrage among the population.
The German Bishops’ Conference was also critical. Dealing with an expression of religious belief is inappropriate, said a spokeswoman for the editorial network Germany. “We are promoting a fair election campaign, which should be carried out on the basis of factual issues and in dealing with the election programs.”
In an interview with RTL West, Laschet also spoke up on Monday evening. After a tweet from the RTL regional window, Laschet said: “I was surprised by the methods that Olaf Scholz now uses to campaign for elections.” The interview should be broadcast from 6 p.m. (08/10/2021)
Schulze: Evidence for man-made climate change “overwhelming”
Federal Environment Minister Svenja Schulze calls for an amendment to the Basic Law in order to be able to involve the federal government in protecting Germany from the consequences of climate change. “The adaptation to floods and drought will continue to accompany us in the next few years,” said the SPD politician in Düsseldorf Rheinische Post before the publication of the new report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on Monday. “So far, the federal states and municipalities have been responsible for this. I advocate joint financing with the federal government, because we have to prepare ourselves permanently for more frequent extreme weather events.”
The July floods in North Rhine-Westphalia and Rhineland-Palatinate had killed more than 180 people. Numerous localities suffered severe damage, some of them severe. Referring to the report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Schulze said: “The report also makes it unmistakably clear that we have to be prepared for more and more extreme weather events in Germany as well. They won’t go away, because we can’t turn back the climate change that has already taken place. We can But slow down global heating. ” Schulze also emphasized that there was no longer any doubt about man-made climate change. “The evidence is overwhelming.” (08/09/2021)
AfD boss Chrupalla questions asylum law and does not distance himself from controversial candidates
AfD boss Tino Chrupalla questioned the right of asylum in a conversation he had on the sidelines of the ARD summer interview. The moderator wanted to know from Chrupalla what should happen to Afghans who had supported the Bundeswehr on site. He asked if, in Chrupalla’s opinion, they could come to Germany and apply for asylum. After all, if the Taliban continued to gain power in Afghanistan, they would have to fear for their lives. If it were up to Chrupalla, those affected could apply for asylum, but before entering Germany. With this, the AfD boss is against the law. Such exceptions therefore only apply to people arriving from another European country or from a safe third country. Afghanistan is not one of them.
Chrupalla also did not distance himself from his party’s controversial candidates for the federal election during the summer interview. He was asked specifically whether he was distancing himself from Jens Maier, who is second on the Saxon state list after Chrupalla. The AfD member of the Bundestag Maier had been classified as a right-wing extremist by the protection of the constitution.
Chrupalla then said: “I can only distance myself from statements that I have made myself.” He doesn’t start to distance himself from people all the time. There are several currents in the party. As federal spokesman, he must try to unite them. “And I succeed.” Looking at the Saxon state list, he said: “All people have a flawless police clearance certificate.”
Chrupalla was also asked about the controversial North Rhine-Westphalian AfD Bundestag candidate Matthias Helferich because of statements in a chat and why he was against a party expulsion process. Chrupalla said the federal executive had spoken out in favor of tough “party regulatory measures” such as a ban on office. According to party circles, there was no majority in the federal executive committee at last Monday’s meeting to exclude Helferich from the party.
In May, Helferich was elected to the promising seventh place on the state list for the federal election in NRW. In a video that he published on his Facebook page shortly before the meeting of the federal executive board, Helferich addressed the allegations. For example, he did not deny that he described himself as the “friendly face of NS” in a chat. However, this term was merely a third-party attribution by left-wing bloggers whom he “satirized”, he explained in his video. (08/09/2021)
List of Saar Greens finally excluded from the election
In the federal election, the Greens have to get along with Chancellor candidate Annalena Baerbock without votes from the Saarland. The majority of the federal electoral committee confirmed that the state list of the Greens on the Saar will not be approved.
The background is a serious dispute in the state party over the list. In the first attempt on June 20, the former state party leader Hubert Ulrich, who came from Saarlouis, was voted first and thus the top candidate of the Saar Greens. An arbitration tribunal then declared the choice of this list to be invalid because party members who were not entitled to vote had also voted. It also saw a violation of the party’s women’s statute.
Ulrich is the spokesman for the Saarlouis local association. Before the second attempt at the list election, the Federal Arbitration Court of the Greens then excluded 49 delegates from the Saarlouis local association. The party court had found irregularities in the election of the delegates in the local association.
The Greens are likely to miss tens of thousands of votes that would have counted for their strength in the Bundestag. In the 2017 federal election, however, the Saar Greens contributed less than 0.1 percentage points to the nationwide result of 8.9 percent. In polls for the federal election on September 26th, the Greens currently see values around 20 percent. (08/05/2021)
Bremen’s AfD list was approved for the federal election
The AfD can run for the Bundestag election in Bremen with a state list. In Berlin, the federal electoral committee granted a complaint by the party against a contrary decision by the state electoral committee. The decision was made after a lengthy legal discussion.
The state electoral committee had justified its decision with the fact that the election proposal did not include the affidavit of the secretary of the electoral assembly. Nor had she signed the minutes of the election meeting. The secretary had justified her refusal to provide the signatures with alleged irregularities at the election meeting. Some members were not properly invited. The background is quarrels in the AfD state association in Bremen.
The Federal Electoral Committee found that there was a legal loophole for such cases that had to be closed. Federal Returning Officer Georg Thiel stated that it could not be that a single person would blow up an election meeting and its decisions by refusing to sign. “We shouldn’t open the door wider to such problem cases.” (08/05/2021)