The Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), the new political force challenging Germany’s increasingly frail globalist establishment from the left, has been officially recognized as a parliamentary group (Gruppe) in the Bundestag. This will allow the party to secure access to an annual budget of €4.9 million in state funds as starting capital.
The status of ‘group’ (Gruppe) is different from the status of ‘faction’ (Fraktion) in the Bundestag. The formation of a faction requires at least five percent of the members of the Bundestag belonging to the same party—currently, 38. When a party drops below that number (or, as in the case of the BSW, MPs form a new party), the individuals retain their seats but lose their privileges as a faction. The Bundestag’s rules of procedure enable MPs who want to join forces but do not reach the minimum faction size to be recognized as a group. The formation of a faction is guided by law, while the Bundestag makes a majority decision whether to accept the formation of a group. Factions have more extensive formal rights than groups; groups have more rights than unattached individual members.
The Bundestag currently has five factions: SPD, Greens, and FDP in the traffic light coalition and CSU/CDU and Afd in opposition.
The recognition of the BSW’s parliamentary group—comes after Die Linke (The Left) faction (Fraktion) of the Bundestag announced its dissolution in November of last year following the departure of Wagenknecht and nine other MPs, who cited the party’s continuing left-liberal drift as their motivation for doing so.
Alongside the BSW, the remaining 28 MPs of The Left regained official parliamentary group status in the Bundestag, allowing the group to receive a total of €7.4 million each year from taxpayer funds.
Members of both groups will now have significantly more parliamentary rights than they previously enjoyed as non-attached MPs.
Among the rights afforded to the groups, as specified by the legal framework of the Bundestag, are the following:
- The ability to send MPs to specialist committees and, if necessary, their subcommittees
- One member in the Council of Elders and the right to vote in decisions on internal affairs in the Bundestag
- The right to introduce draft laws, motions, and motions for resolutions
- The right to submit up to ten major or minor questions per calendar month
- The right to request their proposals be placed on the agenda and, if necessary, that interim reports be submitted on their proposals
- The right to submit point-of-order motions if they are supported by at least 37 MPs
Other rights of parliamentary groups are not set in law, but determined by a majority in the Bundestag. MPs from BSW and The Left have leveled criticism against the ruling parties for using this power to limit the number of questions they are allowed to submit to ten per month. Previously, The Left parliamentary faction submitted around 40 inquiries to the government per month.
“This restriction is an outrage. The traffic light coalition wants to drastically restrict the opposition’s control rights, especially with regard to the parliamentary right to ask questions,” Left chairwoman Janine Wissler told Rheinische Post.
“Small and large inquiries would bring information to light that the government and authorities would prefer to keep under wraps,” she added. “We have repeatedly put our finger in the wound. That’s what the traffic light obviously wants to prevent us from doing.”
BSW MP Jessica Tatti, for her part, referred to the restriction as “unnecessary bullying of the opposition,” adding: “I think it’s absolutely wrong, small-minded, and legally questionable that the government is restricting the rights of the opposition to [restrict inquiries] like this.”
Deputy chairwoman of the Union (CDU/CSU) faction in the Bundestag Andrea Lindholz (CSU) has ruled out cooperating with the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), telling the Deutsche Presse Agentur that she “can’t imagine” working with the new party “any more than she can imagine working with the Left Party.” Everything we know about the BSW program so far, she continued, shows that the party is a “mix between the AfD and the Left Party,” and “neither of those things fit us at all.”
Lindholz also distanced herself from Hans-Georg Maaßen’s Values Union. “As far as the so-called Union of Values is concerned, the people who express themselves there are politically very close to the AfD. I wouldn’t be surprised if some members are there too and are already known to our security authorities.”
Germany’s domestic intelligence agency days ago placed Maaßen under observation over his alleged sympathies for and connections with ‘right-wing extremism,’ as The European Conservative previously reported.
“I am stunned by the path that Hans-Georg Maaßen has taken. I have often asked myself the question of when Mr. Maaßen took the wrong turn,” the Union parliamentary faction deputy chief said.
