The first post-war state parliament in Bavaria was constituted in December 1946 – and the first committees of inquiry were set up just two months later. It was about “grievances in the State Ministry for Economic Affairs and in the economic offices” in the advice of the later Federal Chancellor Ludwig Erhard. Witnesses were heard in 17 sessions, and thousands of letters from citizens were “used in so far as they served the subject of evidence,” noted the final report. With Erhardt, the “integrity of the person” is out of the question, but he has “not carried out his task as one should have expected of him”. Because Erhardt was “too much theoretician”, there were organizational deficits: “little kings” in economic offices in the country, as an invitation for crooked business. The committee demanded that “the cleanliness of the civil servants’ bodies be restored”, but was outraged by “defamatory attacks” by the press – namely that committee members themselves had stolen goods from a warehouse and a CSU member of the CSU had “heavily enriched himself” in wood deals.
In 1947 things quickly continued in U-Committees – with “adventurous personalities” in a ministry, as it is called in a more recent chronicle of the state parliament. And about the power struggle in the CSU: Last year, did senior ministers “blacken” Anton Pfeiffer, the head of the state chancellery in the US military government, and at the same time accelerate the denazification process of CSU boss Josef Müller, the legendary “Ochsensepp”?
Corruption, organizational errors, intrigues – the early history of the U-Committees already contained a lot of what was to shape the following decades. The state parliament initiated the format a total of 65 times. A new committee will soon be added, the Greens, SPD and FDP want to clarify how the procurement of corona masks went exactly; One reason are the allegations against the MP and former Justice Minister Alfred Sauter, now ex-member of the CSU parliamentary group.
U-committees are considered to be the strictest control instrument of parliament. According to the law, the gathering of evidence must be “in the public interest”; Completed administrative processes are permitted as “ex-post controls” so that the investigation does not interfere with ongoing government decisions. Only a fifth of the MPs are required to be elected.
Almost everything was thematically present for decades: overpriced construction projects, police work, allocation of university places, casino concessions, both larger and smaller alleged Schmu. In addition, the notorious Amigo stories with protagonists such as the “spa king” Eduard Zwick, the “chicken king” Friedrich Jahn from the Vienna Woods or the “bribe king” (quote imageNewspaper) and gun lobbyist Karlheinz Schreiber. The results were sometimes exciting, sometimes straightforward, and the end often unforgiving.
In the case of the Wackersdorf reprocessing plant from 1985 to 1986, the focus was not on the ecological question or the protests, but on financial commitments by the state government to the German Society for the Reprocessing of Nuclear Fuels. The CSU under Prime Minister Franz Josef Strauss came to the conclusion that Bavaria had by no means “chased away” Lower Saxony with bait offers. The SPD, on the other hand, criticized exactly that – a “subsidy race”.
The Bavarian state parliament has initiated a committee of inquiry 65 times in the course of its history. The reasons for this were, for example, the WAA reprocessing plant in Wackersdorf, …
Image: AP
… casino licenses or …
Image: picture alliance / dpa
… the case of Gustl Mollath.
Image: Armin Weigel / dpa
The following committee topics of the recent past will be remembered: 2018 the sale of non-profit GBW apartments by the Landesbank, under the responsibility of the then Finance Minister Markus Söder. The interpretation of the cause is still controversial today. Or: the committee on the salmonella scandal at “Bayern-Ei”, on the model building affair involving ex-State Chancellery head Christine Haderthauer and on the Gustl Mollath case. The National Socialist Underground (NSU) and possible failures by Bavarian security authorities have also been discussed over the past decade. In view of new information, for example about informants in the neo-Nazi scene, there have recently been individual calls for another NSU committee.
Only once did the CSU lose its majority because of an affair. That was in 2008 when the Christian Socialists fell from more than 60 percent to less than 44 percent and had to form a coalition with the FDP. At that time, the electorate probably punished the CSU for losses of the Landesbank in the billions. A U committee had previously unearthed numerous embarrassing details.
Edmund Stoiber’s megalomania – he wanted to play in the Champions League internationally with the state bank – and sloppy controls by several CSU ministers on the Landesbank’s supervisory body had led to the financial disaster. The political debacle for the CSU followed. Erwin Huber had to go as party leader, Günther Beckstein as prime minister. Both had not done well in the Landesbank affair.
Government and party leader Markus Söder does not have to fear a similar personal fate. He stays away from anything that could be captivating for him. And he recently tried demonstratively on the offensive: New transparency rules should make his party more scandal-resistant. How much the CSU still has to suffer from the new affairs is of course open.