The social democrat SPD’s parliamentary group leader, Matthias Miersch, hit back at criticism voiced by several Catholic bishops over the party’s radical left-wing candidate for the Constitutional Court, Frauke Brosius-Gersdorf—who believes unborn life deserves no human rights and wants to legalize abortion up to birth—calling the concerned religious leaders “unchristian.”
“I am very outraged at how prominent bishops and cardinals have become involved in this matter,” Miersch said in an interview on Monday, July 14th. He added:
The Church can certainly be political. But taking part in this agitation is unchristian.
As we wrote last week, the confirmation vote of the candidates of both ruling parties, CDU and SPD, was supposed to take place in the Bundestag last Friday but was postponed due to the large public backlash forcing some of the CDU lawmakers to protest the candidacy of Brosius-Gersdorf, despite the parties already having an agreement to support each other’s candidates.
Brosius-Gersdorf, an ‘ultra-left’ law professor, has made a name for herself in recent years due to her outrageous statements, including her belief that unborn fetuses have no “human dignity” and therefore deserve no constitutional protection either.
She was also a main proponent of vaccine mandates during the pandemic, and has advocated several times for banning the right-wing populist AfD, Germany’s second-largest party. Her only regret was that such a measure would not “eliminate” AfD’s voter base as well.
After she was put forward as the SPD’s candidate for the country’s top court and confirmed by the Bundestag’s electoral committee last week, Catholic bishops Stefan Oster and Rudolf Voderholze released a statement calling her appointment “a radical attack on the foundation of our Constitution,” saying a person like that
should not be entrusted with the binding interpretation of the Basic Law. There must never again be second-class citizens in Germany.
They were then joined by Auxiliary Bishop Thomas Maria Renz, who warned that German Christians would suddenly find themselves “politically homeless” if the far-left lawyer was elected; as well as by Irme Stetter-Karp, President of the Central Committee of German Catholics, who said it was “unacceptable not to attribute human dignity to children during their nine months in the womb.”
Mierch, however, dismissed these concerns as part of an unprecedented “smear campaign” that he claimed was primarily driven by right-wing groups online, and slammed the CDU for hesitating to fulfill its gentlemen’s agreement to back Brosius-Gersdorf due to the public backlash.
No matter the pressure, the socialists will not replace her, the top SPD politician insisted. “Just because there is bad propaganda doesn’t mean we change candidates,” he said. “I want to make it very clear here: if the right-wing mob gets away with it, we’re making a huge mistake.”
With her agenda to ban the AfD, the political stakes involved in getting someone like Brosius-Gersdorf on the Constitutional Court are immense for all sides. The SPD has already begun building the institutional framework for such a ban, and all they need is someone in the top judicial circles to make it legally possible as well.
