Germany’s outgoing Bundestag will go out with a bang on Tuesday with an all-or-nothing sitting to back – or sink – an unprecedented €1 trillion stimulus plan for defence, climate and infrastructure spending.
The sitting marks the involuntary departure of hard-left firebrand Sahra Wagenknecht, three weeks after losing her election gamble that Germany was ready for the BSW: a leftist conservative party named after her and with anti-migrant, pro-Russian positions.
In a final roll of the dice, Wagenknecht failed in a court application to stop Tuesday’s sitting of the outgoing parliament ahead of the new Bundestag’s inaugural sitting in a week’s time.
Mainstream parties in the new Bundestag will lack the necessary two-thirds majority for major changes to German debt rules, anchored in the constitution or Basic Law. For that reason the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) chairman Friedrich Merz has recalled outgoing Bundestag MPs for one final vote on Tuesday.
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Taken together his CDU, centre-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) and Greens have 31 votes more than they need for a two-thirds supermajority – but even Merz acknowledged he cannot be certain of a majority until the vote goes through.
“I am confident that we will achieve the amendments to the Basic Law tomorrow with great unity,” said Merz before a final meeting on Monday, where he promised to hold talks with dissenters. “It’ll be tight but it’ll work out.”
Over the weekend a series of furious CDU politicians announced they would abstain from or vote against the two-pronged plan, a dramatic U-turn on their campaign promises last month.
As well as €500 billion for infrastructure and climate projects, to be borrowed and spent over the coming decade, MPs are being asked to exclude all defence spending above 1 per cent of German GDP from debt rules – effectively removing the upper limit on borrowing.
[ German Bundestag buries Swabian housewife under €1 trillion debt pileOpens in new window ]
On Monday Germany’s constitutional court in Karlsruhe received a final, last-minute injunction application from the far-right Alternative for Deutschland (AfD), objecting to the package on the grounds of rushed procedure without parliamentary expert hearings.
Even if the final application fails, leading AfD figures and Wagenknecht are determined to halt proceedings using article 39 of the Basic Law, referenced in a failed injunction ruling against Tuesday’s sitting.
“The constitutional court emphasised that the new Bundestag must convene if one third of MPs demand it,” said Wagenknecht. “Then the old Bundestag can no longer meet and can no longer decide anything.”
That last-minute intervention from new Bundestag MPs is unlikely to succeed as it would require an alliance of the AfD and the Left (Linke) party.
Wagenknecht walked out of the Linke last year to form a new BSW alliance and secured double-digit results in three eastern regional elections last September. But support leaked away in the subsequent months and the party ended last month’s election about 9,500 votes – or 0.2 points – short of clearing the 5 per cent hurdle to enter the new Bundestag.
Post-election analysis showed protest voters, furious with the political mainstream, were more likely to back the AfD and Linke.
The latter, with no love lost for Wagenknecht, rejected the Wagenknecht blockade proposal as “political stultification practised by BSW and AfD”.
As a result Tuesday marks Wagenknecht’s likely last public outing as an MP after three decades in the German and European parliaments. The 56-year-old faces an uncertain future after a senior court rejected a BSW application for a full recount of the February 23rd votes.
Even if Tuesday’s borrowing vote goes through the Bundestag, Wagenknecht indicated further legal tricks up her sleeve to get her way: “A correct [election] result can only be determined through a complete recount.”
