A legal opinion on the introduction of a so-called extremism clause in the Bavarian Parliamentary Law should be available by the parliamentary summer break. According to its own information, the state parliament commissioned the holder of the chair for public law, security law and the law of new technologies at the University of Passau, Tristan Barczak, to prepare it. The summer break begins at the end of July, the last plenary session before that is currently scheduled for July 18th.
“I see it as a dangerous gap that we currently have to allow enemies of the constitution to be paid with tax money,” said State Parliament President Ilse Aigner (CSU) on Wednesday in Munich. However, closing this gap is legally very complex – so she would like to thank Barczak “extremely for his willingness to examine this question carefully.”
In mid-March, Aigner announced that, on the basis of a legal opinion, it would be examined whether anti-constitutional employees of state parliament factions would no longer have to be paid salaries in the future. So far, the state parliament office has no legal basis to refuse to pay wages to “extremists who are clearly anti-constitutional.” This legal basis does not yet exist in any German parliament; according to Aigner, it should become part of parliamentary law in Bavaria.
The employees of members of the state parliament conclude employment contracts directly with the members of parliament; the state parliament office only covers the remuneration. Bayerischer Rundfunk recently reported that the AfD parliamentary group in the Bundestag and its MPs employed more than 100 people who were active in organizations that were classified as right-wing extremist by German constitutional protection offices. Among them are activists from the “Identitarian Movement”, ideological thinkers from the “New Right” and several neo-Nazis.
Aigner emphasized that the problem was also known in the Bavarian state parliament: “We have also become aware of individual cases according to which there are employees of MPs who belong to organizations that are clearly classified as unconstitutional.” However, she could not comment directly on these people.