Election of the government in Berlin
Wegner’s bumpy start and the alleged AfD votes
Kai Wegner takes his oath of office in the Berlin House of Representatives. photo
© Christophe Gateau/dpa
The CDU politician Wegner wanted to become head of government in Berlin. With the SPD, he had a whopping majority in parliament. But then everything turned out differently.
Ah, Berlin. Isn’t anything going smoothly here? Only the repetition of the House of Representatives election due to serious glitches. Then the spectacular change of coalition of the SPD state leader Franziska Giffey away from the Greens and Left to the CDU, including the renunciation of the office of Governing Mayor. And now a drama about the choice of her successor with an unclear role for the AfD. The capital is facing complicated times. Majorities are shaking, wounds are to be licked. In any case, there is no talk of a clean restart.
Actually, the CDU politician Kai Wegner wanted to move into the Red City Hall with the full majority of the new black-red coalition as Governing Mayor. In the early afternoon, the chimney sweeps were ready to greet people at the government headquarters, a traditional line of lucky charms. But Wegner didn’t come. Because everything turned out differently.
A debacle for Wegner
The House of Representatives met at 12 noon to vote for Wegner. But at 12.47 p.m. it was clear: Wegner had failed in the first ballot. And not only just, but by a large distance. The CDU and SPD together have 86 of the 159 mandates in the state parliament. Wegner would have needed an absolute majority of 80 of them. But just 71 MPs voted for him – 15 less than the red-black camp has. A debacle.
Parliament President Cornelia Seibeld interrupted the session for 30 minutes to give the parliamentary groups time to sort themselves out. In a trial vote during this break, the Social Democrats are reported to have had 32 MPs in favor of Wegner and only two against him. Wegner is said to have received 100 percent from the CDU. But in the secret vote in the plenary session, things looked different again: Wegner again missed the necessary majority in the second round, albeit narrower this time: 79 yes votes against 79 no votes. Unprecedented.
Again the meeting was interrupted, and this time with so much time that the CDU and SPD were able to pass the buck around. “There are obviously many in the SPD who are using the election of the governing mayor to settle accounts with Franziska Giffey and Raed Saleh,” said Berlin CDU member of the Bundestag Jan-Marco Luczak to the editorial network Germany. Giffey and her co-head of state Saleh, who had engineered the coalition change to the CDU and thus met with considerable resistance in their own ranks.
“I am very sure that it is from the ranks of the CDU”
An SPD membership decision only narrowly approved the coalition with the CDU. And it was reasonable to assume that some Social Democrats in the House of Representatives would not go along with it. However, the SPD did not want to let that sit on its own. The SPD MP Orkan Özdemir told the dpa: “I am very sure that it is from the ranks of the CDU.” It is up to the CDU and Wegner to close the ranks. One theory among the Social Democrats went like this: There are still open accounts in the CDU against Wegner because the Berlin party colleague, who had served in the top posts, had passed over him.
At the time, the Greens already saw a “disastrous start” for the planned black-red government. Because a third round of voting was only intended as an “emergency solution” in the state constitution, they requested, together with the left, that the meeting be adjourned. But the CDU and SPD wanted to know: third ballot.
Did the AfD make Wegner mayor?
And really: At 4.43 p.m. the time had come. Kai Wegner was actually elected the new head of government in the capital with 86 votes in favor and 70 against. But now he had a new problem: the AfD had let it be known in a press release that they were now voting for the CDU man out of “responsibility for the entire city”. So is Wegner the governing mayor only thanks to AfD votes?
It is unlikely that this will ever be ascertained with certainty. This time, too, the vote was secret, and once again no one knows exactly who voted and how. AfD parliamentary group leader Kristin Brinker did not do much to clarify how many of her colleagues had voted for Wegner: “I can’t say an exact number. It was a secret election. Not all MPs were there, there were also some who did not support Wegner wanted to vote.”
Between scandal and feint
In the social networks, the commentators immediately split into two camps. Some called the AfD votes a scandal. The others thought the AfD announcement was a ploy to discredit Wegner’s election.
The new head of government initially showed nothing but relief. He accepted the election and was immediately sworn in. At 4:45 p.m. everything was done. All alone, Wegner sat for minutes in the seats reserved for the government in Parliament, while the Speaker of the Parliament thanked the outgoing Prime Minister Giffey and the senators.
And now? The new government can get started for the remaining three years of the legislature. But the Wegner-Giffey duo starts with a heavy mortgage. The germ of distrust between the two governing parties lies in this confused election. And in the already quarreling SPD, harmony should not necessarily break out after this course, the state chairmen Giffey and Saleh look plucked. The left MP Tobias Schulze tweeted with some bitterness, but now he has to go into the opposition, but the question is now driving many: “Chaos days in the House of Representatives. How is it supposed to be governed for three more years?”