The AfD in the Bundestag: How much exclusion is still democratic?

The prevention of the AfD presidency candidates for Bundestag committees makes it clear that the other parliamentary groups are out to distance themselves. Group leader Chrupalla sees it as a “break with parliamentary traditions”. The FDP was also able to enforce a spatial separation.

From Kaspar Sachse

The AfD has little to laugh about in the Bundestag. When the technical committees were constituted on Wednesday, their candidates for the chairmanship fell in two committees in the afternoon through. In the health committee, the AfD member Jörg Schneider was not elected to office. In the Committee for Economic Cooperation and Development, Dietmar Friedhoff suffered the same fate as them world reported.

Shortly afterwards, the AfD-nominated chairman Martin Hess from Baden-Württemberg was also rejected in a secret ballot in the Interior Committee. Until further notice, all three committees will be headed by the respective deputy chairmen, on whom the committee members agreed after the rejection of the AfD chairman candidate. The question immediately arises what the 4,695,611 first and 4,803,902 second votes of the voters in the 20th German Bundestag are worth at all.

AfD parliamentary group leader Tino Chrupalla quite rightly sees this public dismantling “not only as a break with parliamentary traditions, but also as a fatal signal for democratic culture in this country”. The AfD’s request to have three committee chairmen resulted “from the result of a democratically conducted federal election” – and that was in effect until the AfD moved in in 2017. SPD parliamentary group vice-president Gabriela Heinrich said about the election in the development committee that it was a democratic decision and “a decision of conscience”.

In the same direction argued Left-wing politician Petra Pau, who will provisionally head the Interior Committee from now on: “The results are to be accepted.” You will carry out the office “as long as it is necessary, completely non-partisan”.

So again the entire legislative period? Because already between 2017 and 2021 no AfD representative was elected to the Presidium of the Bundestag – just like in the newly constituted “People’s Representation”.

The exclusion drove the FDP to extremes, which until before its appearance as the government faction still had most of the overlap with the “dirty children”[n] of the republic “- so the DOES on Thursday about the AfD members of the Bundestag – had. But since the membership in the Ampel government one is a “force of the middle, and therefore we belong in the middle of the plenary”, so FDP parliamentary leader Johannes Vogel.

The Bundestag decided on Thursday – against the votes of the CDU – an implementation. Now the FDP is sitting next to the Greens. And now it fits in well. On the other hand, the question of how a CDU, which has now also been booted out of the opposition, will get along side by side with the “filthy children” remains exciting. Either way, the Christian Democrats, unlike the AfD, have yet to learn how to work properly in the opposition – as AfD co-leader Alice Weidel once again impressively demonstrated on Wednesday.

more on the subject – FDP wants to move away from the AfD: there is an application for a new seating arrangement in the Bundestag