Union parliamentary group leader Friedrich Merz sees the constitutional court’s stop on a Bundestag vote on the heating law as a “severe defeat for Olaf Scholz’s federal government,” as he wrote on Twitter. “The federal government’s unspeakable dealings with parliament and the public have now been put under a stop,” said the CDU chairman of the German Press Agency. This shows that climate protection “does not work with a crowbar”. March advised the chancellor and the federal government to pause now. Things cannot go on as before.
The deputy chairman of the FDP, Wolfgang Kubicki, sees the decision as a “deserved acknowledgment for the Greens, who put inexplicable pressure on this process.” The constitutional judges had made it clear that proper advice was necessary in order to get the population’s acceptance of serious and far-reaching political measures, the Bundestag Vice President told the newspapers of the Funke media group. “We expect our green coalition partners to be humble about this decision.”
“Finally stamp out the botched law”
State group head Alexander Dobrindt spoke up for the CSU. “The Federal Constitutional Court has now put up a stop sign for the repeated disregard for Parliament by the traffic light government,” said Dobrindt. “The traffic light should now be considered and this botched law should finally be stamped out.” The decision was “a serious smack for the arrogance traffic light and its disrespectful treatment of parliamentary rights and the public,” he added.
SPD faction deputy Matthias Miersch, on the other hand, was relaxed. He only sees the Bundestag procedure affected by the Karlsruhe decision, but not the content of the regulation. “The decision must of course be respected. It does not affect the content of the law,” said Miersch of Düsseldorf Rheinische Post. “The court expressly points to the possibility of a special session, which must now be discussed.”
The CDU MP Thomas Heilmann, who had submitted the application to which Karlsruhe has now responded with the decision, was satisfied. “Of course I was convinced that four days of parliamentary participation could not meet our standards of democracy,” he told the German Press Agency. “I’m pleased that the Federal Constitutional Court has now followed me. That will certainly have consequences for parliamentarism that I can’t quite overlook so spontaneously.”