Supplementary budget and seating arrangement: the FDP in focus

Finance Minister Lindner is presenting his supplementary budget in the Bundestag today – the Union has constitutional concerns. The FDP request to change the seating arrangement also causes controversy – the parliamentary group wants to move into the middle.

The Bundestag is dealing with the new government’s 60 billion euro supplementary budget for the first time. Federal Finance Minister Christian Lindner presented the project in the plenary, through which expenditure on climate protection and digitization should be financed in the coming years.

The FDP politician plans to reallocate 60 billion euros from unused loans to fight the corona pandemic. They should be kept in a climate and transformation fund, so to speak, so that they can still be used in the years to come. The federal government is not incurring any new debts as a result of the reallocation.

Opposition wants to file norms control complaint

The opposition still considers the move to be constitutionally questionable because money that was approved to fight the corona crisis is to be used for climate protection and other projects. The Union parliamentary group therefore wants to lodge a complaint with the Federal Constitutional Court.

In the Ministry of Finance, on the other hand, it is argued that the pandemic also made many investments in climate protection impossible, which must now be made up for.

The reallocation is necessary above all because Lindner has promised to comply with the debt brake again from 2023. Then only a few loans can be taken out – possibly too little to finance the major projects of the Ampel coalition in the areas of climate and digitalization.

Dispute over FDP request to change the seating arrangement

The plan of the Ampel coalition to change the seating arrangements in the Bundestag also meets with resistance from the Union: The FDP would like to move to the center of the plenary. The CDU / CSU MPs would then have to take a seat on the right, right next to the AfD. Union parliamentary group leader Ralph Brinkhaus was outraged: “How small is that?” He said in plenary on Wednesday.

The parliamentary director of the Union faction, Patrick Schnieder, told the “Rheinische Post”: “This will have an impact on other questions of the coexistence of majority and minority in parliamentary processes.” With their approach, the traffic light terminates the previous practice in the Bundestag, “that all parliamentary groups try to clarify the questions of the internal organization of the Bundestag in the Council of Elders together.”

The new coalition could also show its respect for the democratic opposition “by respecting the 70-year-old seating arrangement in this parliament and not overturning it with your majority,” said Brinkhaus. He criticized the fact that the traffic light parliamentary groups wanted to “whip the motion through the German Bundestag without a debate”.

FDP parliamentary group leader Christian Dürr rejected the objection. He pointed out that in his speech in the Bundestag on Wednesday Brinkhaus had announced an opposition without “bitterness and disappointment and indignation” – his criticism of the change in the seating arrangement, on the other hand, sounded “insulted”.

“Are force of the political center”

FDP parliamentary director Johannes Vogel defended the project. “The FDP is the power of the political center in this country, because we combine economic and social freedom. That is why the faction of Free Democrats should also sit in the middle of the plenary,” he told the online edition of the “Rheinische Post”.

“The seating arrangements in the Bundestag clearly follow the political left-right scheme – with one exception,” explained Vogel. “We want to change this exception since our return to the Bundestag in 2017.”

The parliamentary secretary of the Greens, Irene Mihalic, justified the request of the traffic light groups to change the seating arrangement. “The seating arrangements in the plenary are not set in stone. A look at the state parliaments shows the different options,” she told the “Rheinische Post”.

In addition, Parliament finally deals with the plan to extend the investment program to accelerate the expansion of all-day care by one year.