German lawmakers were disciplined more times in the current parliamentary session than in the previous four combined, according to a report Sunday in the Augsburger Allgemeine newspaper.
While debates in the Bundestag have a reputation for being particularly dull affairs — especially when compared to the Ukrainian, Taiwanese or UK parliaments, this has slightly changed with the arrival of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which has tried to play up its anti-establishment reputation.
According to the Augsburger Allgemeine, the majority of reprimands in the Bundestag were directed towards members of the populist party.
In 2020 alone, there were 20 calls to order and one reprimand. A major cause for disturbance has been the failure to wear a mask while entering the parliamentary hall.
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AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Christian Lüth
Ex-press officer Christian Lüth had already faced demotion for past contentious comments before being caught on camera talking to a right-wing YouTube video blogger. "The worse things get for Germany, the better they are for the AfD," Lüth allegedly said, before turning his focus to migrants. "We can always shoot them later, that's not an issue. Or gas them, as you wish. It doesn't matter to me."
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AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Alexander Gauland
Co-chairman Alexander Gauland said the German national soccer team's defender Jerome Boateng might be appreciated for his performance on the pitch — but people would not want "someone like Boateng as a neighbor." He also argued Germany should close its borders and said of an image showing a drowned refugee child: "We can't be blackmailed by children's eyes."
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AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Alice Weidel
Alice Weidel generally plays the role of "voice of reason" for the far-right populists, but she, too, is hardly immune to verbal miscues. Welt newspaper, for instance, published a 2013 memo allegedly from Weidel in which she called German politicians "pigs" and "puppets of the victorious powers in World War II." Weidel initially claimed the mail was fake, but now admits its authenticity.
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AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Frauke Petry
German border police should shoot at refugees entering the country illegally, the former co-chair of the AfD told a regional newspaper in 2016. Officers must "use firearms if necessary" to "prevent illegal border crossings." Communist East German leader Erich Honecker was the last German politician who condoned shooting at the border.
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AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Björn Höcke
The head of the AfD in the state of Thuringia made headlines for referring to Berlin's Holocaust memorial as a "monument of shame" and calling on the country to stop atoning for its Nazi past. The comments came just as Germany enters an important election year — leading AfD members moved to expel Höcke for his remarks.
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AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Beatrix von Storch
Initially, the AfD campaigned against the euro and bailouts — but that quickly turned into anti-immigrant rhetoric. "People who won't accept STOP at our borders are attackers," the European lawmaker said in 2016. "And we have to defend ourselves against attackers," she said — even if this meant shooting at women and children.
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AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Marcus Pretzell
Pretzell, former chairman of the AfD in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia and husband to Frauke Petry, wrote, "These are Merkel's dead," shortly after news broke of the deadly attack on the Berlin Christmas market in December 2016.
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AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Andre Wendt
The member of parliament in Germany's eastern state of Saxony made waves in early 2016 with an inquiry into how far the state covers the cost of sterilizing unaccompanied refugee minors. Thousands of unaccompanied minors have sought asylum in Germany, according to the Federal Association for Unaccompanied Minor Refugees (BumF) — the vast majority of them young men.
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AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Andre Poggenburg
Poggenburg, former head of the AfD in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, has also raised eyebrows with extreme remarks. In February 2017, he urged other lawmakers in the state parliament to join measures against the extreme left-wing in order to "get rid of, once and for all, this rank growth on the German racial corpus" — the latter term clearly derived from Nazi terminology.
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AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Alexander Gauland, again ...
During a campaign speech in Eichsfeld in August 2017, AfD election co-candidate Alexander Gauland said that Social Democrat parliamentarian Aydan Özoguz should be "disposed of" back to Anatolia. The German term, "entsorgen," raised obvious parallels to the imprisonment and killings of Jews and prisoners of war under the Nazis.
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AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
... and again
Gauland was roundly criticized for a speech he made to the AfD's youth wing in June 2018. Acknowledging Germany's responsibility for the crimes of the Nazi era, he went on to say Germany had a "glorious history and one that lasted a lot longer than those damned 12 years. Hitler and the Nazis are just a speck of bird shit in over 1,000 years of successful German history."
Author: Dagmar Breitenbach, Mark Hallam
The AfD, who have played up coronavirus conspiracy theories and been accused of spreading misinformation, were the main culprits here.
In one instance the parliamentary leader of the AfD, Alexander Gauland, was mockingly told off for failing to wear a mask with the vice president of the Bundestag saying: "I take it that you were mentally somewhere else in that moment, and that's why you forgot [to put on a mask]."
This was quickly followed up by a member of the socialist Left Party adding: "He always is!"
However, it was not just the AfD who needed to be reminded to cover their mouths and noses, with members from the center-left Social Democrats (SPD) and conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) also being called out for the same infraction.
Even Chancellor Angela Merkel has been forced to react to the relative commotion in the Bundestag.
In June, when far-right MPs heckled her for describing the threat of the "radical, authoritarian movement," she mockingly responded: "Someone appears to have been called out."
While the current session which started in 2017 may have been the unruliest since reunification, it doesn't match the raucousness of the pre-unification West German parliament which was based in the city of Bonn.
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Germany's major political parties — What you need to know
Christian Democratic Union (CDU)
The CDU has traditionally been the main center-right party across Germany, but it shifted toward the center under Chancellor Angela Merkel. The party remains more fiscally and socially conservative compared to parties on the left. It supports membership of the EU and NATO, budgetary discipline at home and abroad and generally likes the status quo. It is the largest party in the Bundestag.
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Germany's major political parties — What you need to know
Christian Social Union (CSU)
The CSU is the sister party of the CDU in Bavaria and the two act symbiotically at the national level (CDU/CSU). Despite their similarities, the CSU is generally more conservative than the CDU on social issues. The CSU leader and premier of Bavaria, Markus Söder, ordered crosses in every state building in 2018.
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Germany's major political parties — What you need to know
Social Democrats (SPD)
The SPD is Germany's oldest political party and the main center-left rival of the CDU/CSU. It shares the CDU/CSU support for the EU and NATO, but it takes a more progressive stance on social issues and welfare policies. It is currently in a coalition government with the CDU/CSU and is trying to win back support under interim leaders Thorsten Schäfer-Gümbel, Manuela Schwesig and Malu Dreyer.
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Germany's major political parties — What you need to know
Alternative for Germany (AfD)
The new kid on the block is the largest opposition party in the Bundestag. The far-right party was founded in 2013 and entered the Bundestag for the first time in 2017 under the stewardship of Alice Weidel and Alexander Gauland. It is largely united by opposition to Merkel's immigration policy, euroscepticism, and belief in the alleged dangers posed by Germany's Muslim population.
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Germany's major political parties — What you need to know
Free Democrats (FDP)
The FDP has traditionally been the kingmaker of German politics. Although it has never received more than 15 percent of the vote, it has formed multiple coalition governments with both the CDU/CSU and SPD. The FDP, today led by Christian Lindner, supports less government spending and lower taxes, but takes a progressive stance on social issues such as gay marriage or religion.
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Germany's major political parties — What you need to know
The Greens
The Greens, led today by Annalena Baerbock and Robert Habeck, emerged from the environmental movement in the 1980s. Unsuprisingly, it supports efforts to fight climate change and protect the environment. It is also progressive on social issues. But strong divisions have occasionally emerged on other topics. The party famously split in the late 1990s over whether to use military force in Kosovo.
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Germany's major political parties — What you need to know
The Left
The Left, led by Katja Kipping and Bernd Riexinger, is the most left-wing party in the Bundestag. It supports major redistribution of wealth at home and a pacifist stance abroad, including withdrawing Germany from NATO. It emerged from the successor party to the Socialist Unity Party (SED) that ruled communist East Germany until 1989. Today, it still enjoys most of its support in eastern Germany.
Author: Alexander Pearson
One prime example given by the Augsburger Allgemeine was the memorable retort by a member of the Green Party — in its first parliamentary session — to the then vice president of the Bundestag.
"Mr. President, with permission, you are an asshole," said Joschka Fischer.
The current Bundestag Vice President and member of the liberal FDP party, Wolfgang Kubicki, told the newspaper that while there are of course lawmakers "who consciously provoke calls to order," it should not be made into a bigger problem than it is.
"The Presidium of the German Bundestag has always been able to respond to these insubordinations with the necessary tact," he said.
ab/mm (dpa, KNA, AFP)
