In Bautzen, the district administrator, AfD and CDU are embarrassing themselves. A woman who can’t do anything about it has to suffer. And the CDU is sowing doubts about how solid its firewall is. What’s going on?
The history of Bautzen’s Commissioner for Foreigners has recently become a story of losers. The Commissioner, Anna Piętak-Malinowska, has been hit particularly hard: On Monday, the Bautzen District Council abolished her position at the request of the AfD – with the help of some CDU district councilors. Without knowing whether this is even legally possible.
But the list of losers is much longer. It includes:
- District Administrator Udo Witschas (CDU), who paved the way for the AfD without understanding what the decision actually means
- The CDU Saxony, which has to face questions just a few days before the state election about how solid its much-vaunted firewall against the AfD is
- The district of Bautzen, which is sending a xenophobic signal while desperately seeking foreign skilled workers for its economy
- The AfD Bautzen with a botched abolition proposal – although that is in the eye of the beholder. The AfD itself probably sees itself as the winner
How could it have come to this?
Monday, August 19, 5 p.m. Large hall in the Bautzen district office: The district council, newly elected in June, is meeting for its first session. The strongest force is the AfD, which has 32 district councillors. It is followed by the CDU with 25 seats.
Bautzen: The AfD has an ace up its sleeve
The district councillors want to pass the main statute, a kind of municipal constitution. It regulates the organisation of the administration and the district council itself. The decision is not actually controversial, because the basic principles of the statute were worked out in advance. But the AfD surprised everyone in the evening with a motion that wants to delete the position of the foreigners’ representative from the main statute.
AfD parliamentary group leader Heike Lotze has another ace up her sleeve: she is calling for a secret vote. In addition to the 32 AfD district councillors, three district councillors from the far-right Free Saxony party, one from the Free Voters, and above all: six CDU district councillors and also District Administrator Witschas himself are in favour of this motion.
That is enough for a majority, and the vote is secret. Apparently some people do not want to be caught voting for the AfD.
Ultimately, 47 MPs are in favor of abolishing the Commissioner for Foreigners and 30 are against it. 7 abstain. It is an open secret that the majority only came about thanks to votes from CDU district councilors.
The CDU does not want to understand the excitement
A call to CDU parliamentary group leader Matthias Grahl. He cannot understand the fuss. Grahl sees it this way: Bautzen is in debt and has to save money. The district council is no longer legally obliged to appoint a foreigners’ representative. So the abolition of the position is only logical.
In fact, until recently, the Saxon district regulations stipulated that the districts “should” appoint “representatives for migration.” And in fact, the passage was deleted in the most recent amendment to the law.
However, this is only because it has been slightly modified since then in another state law: the Saxon Integration Act, which the state parliament passed in June. It states that the districts “should” appoint municipal “full-time representatives for integration and participation”.
The matter is “legally clear,” says CDU man Grahl. There will be a commissioner for foreigners in the future too. And the Union is in favor of it anyway. But now the state has to pay if it prescribes the position in a state law.
But there are considerable doubts about this legal interpretation in Bautzen. Not even District Administrator Witschas can say whether his authority now has to appoint a foreigners’ representative or not. He is still waiting for a regulation from the state, he wrote in response to a request. He wants to “check” what will now happen to the representative herself.
So I called AfD parliamentary group leader Lotze. She will surely know what is going to happen next with the Commissioner for Foreigners. After all, she wrote the application and she also works as a lawyer.
Well.
Lotze says she “cannot say at the moment” whether the new state law now requires the position of foreigners’ representative. “The law says ‘should’. It is not clear whether that means ‘can’ or ‘must’.” Her application had “objective reasons”; she also refers to the changed district regulations and the district’s financial difficulties.
Lotze passes the ball back to District Administrator Witschas. He is “responsible for operational administration.” She does not know the employment contract, nor can she assess “whether the District Administrator will simply assign the employee to another position. I do not want to pre-empt the District Administrator’s decision.”
How solid is the firewall to the AfD really?
We can say that the Bautzen district council is abolishing the foreigners’ representative without knowing whether this is even possible. The CDU is ducking behind legal hair-splitting. The district administrator does not know what consequences the decision will have for his administration and the representative herself.
All of this makes the events in Bautzen a ludicrous episode of local self-government. But the case has a second, more political dimension. Because it raises – once again – the question of how seriously the CDU, and the CDU Saxony in particular, take their own words about the “firewall” against the AfD.
In Bautzen, the Union makes no secret of what it thinks of this word. A ban on cooperation with the AfD, “as it is formulated at the federal and state political level,” says faction leader Grahl, cannot exist at the municipal level. “We do not submit joint motions with the AfD and do not hold joint faction meetings,” he explains. “But we talk to all district councilors. A motion is not bad just because the wrong person submits it.”
District Administrator Witschas, who is also chairman of the Bautzen CDU district association, says that he works “as a district administrator with all district councilors.” Anything else would be “not feasible at all at the municipal level, given the majority situation.”
Ministry of Social Affairs provides clarity
One last question, this time to the Commissioner for Foreigners herself. Will she be able to continue working? “The district administration is still in the process of clarifying what impact the decision will have on me personally, as an employee of the administration, whether and for how long I will be able to carry out my duties as Commissioner,” answers Anna Piętak-Malinowska. “Regardless of the actual impact,” she writes, “the decision naturally has political symbolism.”
On Thursday, the Saxon Ministry of Social Affairs clarified the matter: the removal of the Foreigners’ Commissioner is not compatible with the Integration Act. “The regulation is formulated as a ‘should regulation’,” the authority wrote, and deviations are only permitted “in justified exceptional cases.” Whether “the alleged savings effect” is achieved also requires “supervisory review.”
The losing story of the Bautzen district is now official.
Source: Stern
I have been working in the news industry for over 6 years, first as a reporter and now as an editor. I have covered politics extensively, and my work has appeared in major newspapers and online news outlets around the world. In addition to my writing, I also contribute regularly to 24 Hours World.
