WWe have a good parliament in Germany. Anyone who looks at other large parliaments, the British House of Commons with its Brexit spectacles, the American Congress with its budget blockades or the Polish Sejm, which has been undermining the rule of law for years, should know what Germany has in its Bundestag. It is one of the best parliaments in the world.
Still. Because since the traffic light has the majority, the Bundestag is endangering its reputation. The most recent self-harm he has inflicted with the heating law. The Federal Constitutional Court temporarily stopped the final vote less than 48 hours before the set date because the majority in the House apparently gave the deputies too little time to read their draft law in the first place.
Sometimes it has to be really fast. If there is a pandemic and people die, if Russia invades a country or if a cold winter sets in because someone has just blown up a gas line, then that is force majeure. You can’t wait there. But when it came to the heating law, it wasn’t force majeure that caused Parliament to run out of time, but higher murmuring in the workshops of government.
Disregard for the opposition is a threat to democracy
Incidentally, this was already true of another nasty case of harmful haste: the so-called reform of the electoral law. Here, too, after years of tough debate, the traffic light pulled a bill out of a hat and finally rushed it through committees and plenary sessions as quickly as if the gods were after it.
The result is a law that is far from clear as to whether it will stand up in the Federal Constitutional Court. The heating law and the electoral law reform are similar in another, equally fatal point: In both cases, it is primarily the opposition that suffers, that is, after all, the democratically legitimized minority of a plural order.
The majority, i.e. the traffic light, was hardly hurt by the shortened deadline for the heating law: the draft law came out of their machines. Your specialists knew him and didn’t have to stay up all night to understand his 108 pages of technical jargon. The opposition, on the other hand, had no chance of really penetrating the matter.
coup against the minority
But the arrogance of the majority gets really bad when it comes to the right to vote. The traffic light has deleted the “basic mandate clause”, i.e. the provision according to which a party can enter the Bundestag if it wins at least three constituencies – even if it remains below five percent overall. This means that not only the left will probably be thrown out of parliament, but perhaps also the CSU.
A coup d’état against the minority in democracy that was presumably consciously accepted – or does anyone think that the traffic light would have passed such a law if it hadn’t catapulted two opposition parties out of business, but the FDP or the Greens?
The enemies of open society on the right and on the left like to attack German democracy with the argument that it is not a democracy at all. These are flowers of nonsense, but the traffic light is spreading fertilizer right now. Polls show that a rapidly growing minority of German voters believe that democracy makes no sense and that citizens are powerless anyway. And now the traffic light provides the perfect example of this evil tale.
#Traffic #light #coalition #arrogance #majority #feeds #antidemocratic #myths