Special meeting of the interior committee: Can the federal states disaster control?

More than 170 dead, billions in damages. A special meeting of the Interior Committee dealt with dealing with the severe weather disaster – and once again with the question: What is federalism good for in the event of a disaster?

All parties can probably agree on one thing: the management of the flood disaster in Rhineland-Palatinate and North Rhine-Westphalia went anything but good. But the lessons to be learned from the storm are highly controversial. Do you need other warning systems? Would Cell Broadcasting Help? So warnings on the cell phone, as the Interior Ministry has now decided? Or shouldn’t the number of sirens have to be increased? Did the reporting chain work in the districts?

The special meeting of the Interior Committee was about all of this, but also about the big question that the Greens in particular raised in the room: Is civil protection in its federal structure suitable at all, does it not need more central competencies? Doesn’t the federal government have to take action and coordinate in the end?

Seehofer’s point of view

Interior Minister Horst Seehofer has a clear position on this: “The disaster control in peacetime must be guaranteed by the federal states. That is just as important as the federal structure of the security organs. Anyone who changes that will damage the matter.” On this, he repeated several times, all the interior ministers of the federal states agreed with him.

That’s no surprise. Who from this body would voluntarily have their competencies curtailed? What is remarkable, however, is the basic position. As a reminder: The Union, above all its parliamentary group leader Ralph Brinkhaus, had called for a fundamental reform of federalism, i.e. the federal-state responsibilities, six months ago. The lesson from the management of the corona crisis with the multiple structures in the federal and state levels must be a reform, according to Brinkhaus. In particular, the conferences of the Prime Ministers and the Chancellor were not effective.

Encrusted structures?

Now the corona crisis and the flood disaster are only roughly comparable. But the impression that Germany has encrusted structures, is over-bureaucratized and overwhelmed by major catastrophes, forces many commentators in both cases. So isn’t it possible to make things leaner, simpler, more direct? And: shouldn’t the federal government do that?

The federal government can better support the federal states in the event of a disaster, says the interior minister, but this has been done for decades. With the head of the Federal Office for Civil Protection and Disaster Relief, Armin Schuster, it sounded different last week. “My office has a lot of know-how and little responsibility,” said Schuster. “We only press the warning button in the event of war.” Otherwise, in peacetime, in the event of a disaster, one could only make the knowledge available to the countries.

The fact that the chairman of the Interior Committee, Andrea Lindholz, (like the Federal Interior Minister also from the CSU) is also calling for better federal-state cooperation today shows the direction in which the discussion is heading. Not a major reform, but possibly a reorganization. For that one would have the support of the SPD. “The federal government must also be able to intervene in situations that affect the entire federal territory or that would overwhelm the states alone,” said domestic politician Sebastian Hartmann before the meeting.

Shift of competencies in conversation

That would be a clear shift in competencies towards the federal government, albeit limited to really major emergencies and catastrophes. It is a similar proposal that the domestic political spokeswoman for the Greens, Irene Mihalic, had already made, who spoke of a solution analogous to the coordination function of the Federal Criminal Police Office in dangerous situations in internal security.

Whether one really needs an amendment to the constitution for a conditional shift in competencies, as the Greens are striving for, is a matter of dispute in the committee. But everyone here also knows: Whatever improvements are proposed now, it could take months, if not years, to political implementation – regardless of the amendment to the Basic Law. So the Home Affairs Committee will have to meet a few more times.

On one point there was still agreement among the politicians: The help of the Bundeswehr in the context of administrative assistance was unanimously praised. The structure there, with central control from Berlin and rapid help from the barracks on site, works almost in an exemplary manner.