Parliament: State parliament crisis in Thuringia – constitutional judges decide

Violation of the constitution, violation of the law, blockade? After a chaotic first session of the Thuringian state parliament, the Constitutional Court is supposed to decide what to do next. The parliament in Erfurt is temporarily slipping into a crisis – without a state parliament president, it is not fully operational almost four weeks after the state elections. The law requires that the state parliament be constituted within 30 days of the state election. What happened in Erfurt, the interruption of a state parliament session and the appeal to the Constitutional Court, is considered an “unusual event” by constitutional lawyers.

Confrontation of the AfD with everyone else

The state parliament session on Thursday ended after numerous interruptions, heckling and verbal arguments and with a scandal and a violent confrontation between a strong AfD led by right winger Björn Höcke and the other factions CDU, BSW, Left and SPD. Parliament did not even manage to determine whether it had a quorum. The MPs from the four factions blame this on the AfD’s senior president, Jürgen Treutler. During the turbulent meeting, he did not allow any requests to speak, motions or a debate about the changes to the rules of procedure requested by the political groups.

The members of the CDU, BSW, Left and SPD see their rights as being inadmissibly restricted and the principle of majority and democracy under attack. The AfD, in turn, accuses the other factions of not adhering to parliamentary customs. Höcke accused them of sleight of hand.

What the constitutional judges should decide

The CDU has submitted an urgent application to the constitutional judges, which they are supposed to decide on. According to information from the CDU parliamentary group, the three other factions will also participate in the application. Basically it’s about the rules that senior President Treutler has to adhere to on the second attempt – this includes, for example, sticking to the agenda and not ignoring an amendment from the CDU and BSW. With the proposal they want to ensure that the personnel proposal for the office of state parliament president can come from all parliamentary groups and not just from the AfD as the strongest parliamentary group.

It remains to be seen how the constitutional judges will decide. The AfD senior president can also take a stand. Because it is an urgent procedure, the judges will deliberate but decide without an oral hearing, a spokesman said upon request. The time pressure is in the nature of the matter, but the state parliament cannot bind the constitutional court in terms of time.

According to the lawyer Maximilian Steinbeis, the AfD, as the strongest faction, only has the right to propose the candidate for the office of state parliament president, but not the right for this candidate to be elected. “This is the free decision of the members of the new Thuringian state parliament as to who they want to elect as their state parliament president. And the constitution does not allow the AfD as the strongest faction to do anything more than that,” said Steinbeis on Thursday evening on ZDF’s “heute journal”. Steinbeis is the founder of the Constitution Blog. The Constitution Blog’s “Thuringia Project” addressed the question of what would happen if “authoritarian-populist parties got hold of state power.”

This is how the scandal broke out

The starting point is a dispute over the election of the state parliament president. As the strongest parliamentary group, the AfD, with 32 of 88 MPs, has the right to make proposals. But there is no claim that their candidate will be elected. Since it was clear that Treutler, an AfD MP, was chairing the meeting as senior president, there were fears in advance that the 73-year-old might stubbornly call only AfD candidates for election – who would then one after the other fail in the election. The CDU and BSW therefore submitted a motion that would incorporate constitutional law into the rules of procedure. This means that all political groups should be able to propose candidates from the start.

The meeting was so emotional

The material was legally dry, but emotions still ran high: there were heckling, applause and sometimes verbal confusion. Treutler went through with his speech, which was viewed by many MPs as not impartial. The CDU also accused the AfD man of having far exceeded his authority as senior president. CDU leader Mario Voigt said: “This was an attack on parliamentary rights, on the constitution and on every single member of parliament.” Treutler tried to deprive MPs of the floor, ignored requests and did not respond to repeated requests to determine whether the state parliament had a quorum. Instead, he said several times that he shared the legal opinion of the AfD faction and intended to act accordingly. CDU MP Andreas Bühl said: “What you are doing here is a seizure of power.”

This is how things could continue in Thuringia

A decision from the constitutional judges is not expected until Friday at the earliest. The parties to the dispute may still be given a period of time to comment. In any case, the state parliament session was interrupted until Saturday, 9:30 a.m. It is uncertain whether there will actually be a decision by then.