DThe coalition in Frankfurt’s Römer will vote on Thursday’s session of the city parliament on the motion to vote out the controversial Mayor of Frankfurt, Peter Feldmann (SPD), who is suspected of corruption. This was announced by the four factions of the coalition on Wednesday evening.
If the motion receives the required two-thirds majority at the meeting, the voting procedure is formally initiated. The CDU submitted the application and also advocated a vote on Thursday, so there is no doubt about the number of votes required. The process would be successful if Feldmann accepted the city councilor’s decision within a week. If, as expected, he does not do this, Frankfurt voters will have to vote on the future of the 63-year-old mayor in a referendum on November 6th.
Feldmann sticks to his own proposal
The group meetings of the Greens, SPD and Volt preceded the joint announcement by the coalition. The FDP had already met on Monday. Mayor Feldmann also attended the meeting of the SPD parliamentary group on Wednesday. He is said not only to have been involved in intensive discussions, but also repeatedly made it clear to the city councilors that he would not accept the city parliament’s decision to vote out. As a result, he does not forgo the decision of the citizens on November 6th and an election process, the cost of which has been estimated at around 1.6 million euros. In the parliamentary group meeting, Feldmann once again referred to his own proposal, which he specified on Monday. He plans to initiate the deselection process in January. Then he would also be ready to accept the city council decision and to refrain from the public vote. As in the past few days, Feldmann is said to have said on Wednesday evening that he was ready for talks if the coalition accepted his proposal.
In the end, the SPD parliamentary group voted against Feldmann’s proposal with one dissenting vote and two abstentions and instead stuck to the procedure decided by the coalition in June to vote for the voting motion this Thursday, in the last session of the city parliament before the summer holidays .
Even clearer than that of the SPD was the vote of the Greens parliamentary group, which unanimously voted in favor of initiating the deselection process. Group leader Dimitrios Bakakis announced in the evening that, according to his group, Feldmann had not used the past few days to promote his proposal to vote out in January. To do that, he would have had to build trust. Instead, Feldmann made content from confidential discussions public and put it in the wrong context. The Greens are aware that the referendum planned for November represents a hurdle and could fail, since at least 30 percent of those eligible to vote or around 150,000 Frankfurters would have to vote yes to Feldmann’s deselection. The mayor was re-elected in 2018 with significantly fewer votes.
On the other hand, according to Bakakis, the coalition would be “jointly held liable” for further embarrassing appearances or misconduct on the part of Feldmann in the coming weeks and months if it now postpones the motion to be voted out and only votes on it in the city parliament in January. After all, the court proceedings against Feldmann begin on October 18.
In the Greens group, the decision to initiate the voting procedure on Thursday was also seen as a liberation. Now he citizens have to make the final decision. “We do not have the right to incapacitate citizens for fear of the quorum and thus of a failure of the deselection,” said the Green politician.
#Frankfurt #Mayor #Feldmann #vote #majority #immediately