/ image alliance, dpa, Uli Deck
Karlsruhe – Within two months, the Federal Constitutional Court (BVerfG) wants to decide whether the AfD has the right to chair committees in the Bundestag. It announced this today in Karlsruhe. The chairmen of committees in the Bundestag play an important role in everyday parliamentary life.
The Constitutional Court must decide whether all parliamentary groups have the right to chair or whether committees can decide differently by election. (Ref. 2 BvE 1/20 and 2 BvE 10/21)
Chairs prepare, convene and preside over committee meetings. Parliamentary rules of procedure stipulate that committees appoint chairmen and their deputies in accordance with the agreements of the Council of Elders. In recent decades, this has mostly worked.
If the parliamentary groups are unable to reach an agreement after a federal election, the so-called access procedure comes into play. The parliamentary groups can then alternately access the committee chairs, depending on their size. The voting for committee chairs is not regulated in the rules of procedure.
In November 2019, however, an unprecedented development occurred. At that time, AfD politician Stephan Brandner was removed from the chairmanship of the legal committee. This was preceded by statements by Brandner on social media that caused outrage and were perceived as anti-Semitic. He called singer Udo Lindenberg’s Federal Cross of Merit a “Judas reward”.
Due to this deselection, the AfD parliamentary group has appealed to the Constitutional Court. It also objects to the fact that several of its candidates were not elected committee chairmen after the 2021 federal election.
At that time, there was another novelty in parliament: after the parliamentary groups had demanded the right to chair several committees in the accession procedure, a secret ballot was called for in each committee. The three AfD candidates for the chairs of the Interior, Health and Development Committee failed.
Since then, the committees have been temporarily chaired by vice-presidents. Now the Constitutional Court decides. It has set the date for the verdict to be announced as September 18. © afp/aerzteblatt.de