It is an unusual group that met this Monday in room 4.09 of the European House in Berlin. The room is at the very end of a dark hallway, right next to the toilets. The technology in the room is not working properly. It’s easy to feel pushed into a corner there. In this respect, the place fits in very well with what this is supposed to be about: Germany’s small parties are of the opinion that the traffic light coalition wants to push them out of the European Parliament.
Pirate Party, ÖDP, Volt and The Party have therefore jointly invited to a discussion. Normally they are political competitors – but now they are united by their outrage at the federal government.
The parties complain that the voters’ will is “ignored”.
The traffic light government wants to “deliberately ignore the will of the electorate just to get votes – that’s highly undemocratic,” complains ÖDP MEP Manuela Ripa. “The traffic light’s anti-democratic power politics shocks me,” says Volt MP Damian Boeselager. Martin Sonneborn, who sits for the party in Strasbourg, says he is concerned about democracy in the European Parliament. And Anne Herpertz, the leader of the Pirate Party, criticizes the fact that “several million votes are to be destroyed”. One can hardly condemn a government more drastically.
In the last European elections, the four small parties managed to get into parliament, as did the Animal Welfare Party, the Free Voters and the Family Party. But now an amendment to the European Direct Election Act is to introduce a threshold clause that could force her out of Parliament. It should be at least two percent. The Bundestag has just approved the change to the direct election act – in this case the traffic light coalition and the Union faction were in agreement. The Federal Council is expected to approve the amendment to the Act at its next meeting on July 7th. Apart from Germany, Spain and Cyprus, all EU countries have already agreed.
This blocking clause comes at the instigation of Germany, the small parties complain unanimously. The current federal government and its predecessors had vehemently campaigned for this. The Greens had prevented the change for a long time, without them there would not have been the necessary two-thirds majority in the Bundestag. But the Greens then fell over during the coalition negotiations with the SPD and FDP – that’s why the way is now clear. But why does the traffic light coalition choose the path via Europe and not simply introduce a national threshold? To understand this, a retrospective is necessary.
In the European elections, there was initially a five percent hurdle in Germany. After the 1994 election, for example, the FDP and the Republicans were no longer allowed to send MPs because they had slipped under the hurdle. In 2011, however, the Federal Constitutional Court overturned the five percent hurdle. As a result, a three percent hurdle was decided, which the constitutional court also rejected before the 2014 European elections. The judges found that the electoral clause violated the principles of equal opportunities for political parties and equal voting rights. The situation in the European Parliament is different from that in the Bundestag, “where the formation of a stable majority is necessary for the election of an effective government and its ongoing support”.
Satirist Sonneborn is angry about Frank-Walter Steinmeier
As a result, eight parties entered parliament in the 2014 European elections, although they remained below five percent. One of these MEPs was Martin Sonneborn – he still sits in the European Parliament. On Monday he quotes a passage from an article in the Süddeutsche Zeitung from 2014 to prove that since then there have been efforts to get rid of the small parties by taking a detour via European law.
The article said that the then Foreign Minister and current Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier said that because of Sonneborn’s “joke party” one had to ask oneself “whether it should really be inadmissible for all time to think about a threshold clause for the European Parliament “. If this is not possible via national law, one must consider introducing such a hurdle at European level.
That’s exactly how it happened. If Germany, Spain and Cyprus ratify the change now, the election clause can apply from the European elections after next. With this approach, the German governing parties “have found a way to abuse the European level for undemocratic projects in order to eliminate the German constitutional court,” says Pirate Party leader Herpertz. This is an “abuse of one’s own power to the detriment of political opponents”.
The Pirate Party does not accept the fragmentation argument
Herpertz also does not accept the argument that the European Parliament is allegedly fragmented. On the one hand, around 200 parties from 27 countries are already represented in Parliament, but it is still able to work. On the other hand, almost all deputies from the small German parties have joined the large groups.
In the traffic light coalition, however, they see things very differently. Before the vote in the Bundestag, the FDP MP Valentin Abel pointed out that the 96 German MEPs come from more than a dozen parties. A two-percent threshold clause prevents fragmentation and ensures that “Germany’s representation within the European Parliament can also be strong and self-confident.” In addition, the ability of the entire Parliament to act is strengthened. In its almost 50-year history, it has perhaps never needed this ability to act as urgently as it does now in view of the challenges of “climate change, the aftermath of the Covid pandemic and migration issues”.