A petition from an SPD member calls on the parliamentary group to reject social cuts. The SPD considers this unacceptable for absurd reasons.
Bad mood in the SPD, the executive board wants to prevent an application for membership from the left of the SPD Photo by: Wirth/Zoonar/imago
SEDAN cup | The SPD leadership's justification for rejecting an application for membership from the SPD left wing is not legally convincing. If those affected file a lawsuit, they are likely to succeed.
Three members of the “Democratic Left Forum 21” (DL21), an SPD group in Berlin, had requested that a petition for membership be launched. The aim was a party resolution calling on SPD members in the Bundestag to approve the federal budget for 2025 only if there are no cuts in the areas of social affairs, health, youth, family, education, democracy and development cooperation.
According to the SPD's procedural guidelines for handling member petitions, the SPD leadership must first check the admissibility of the petition, even before it starts collecting signatures. However, the SPD executive announced on Monday that it considers the petition “inadmissible.” It based its opinion on a two-page “report” prepared on behalf of the SPD executive. It is available to the taz.
The party executive is basing itself on a passage from the SPD's statutes: “The subject of a membership petition may only be those resolutions which are not reserved exclusively to a body by party law or other laws.” The preparation of the federal budget is the sole responsibility of the Bundestag, the party executive said.
The argument is legally absurd.
The argument is absurd because it confuses apples with oranges. The MPs' petition does not even claim that the SPD should draw up the federal budget. The Bundestag remains responsible for asking SPD members to vote in a certain way. In the next step, the SPD executive argues that the “free mandate” of the Bundestag members, whose protection is not mentioned in the SPD statutes, is a reason for rejecting members' requests.
According to Article 38 of the Basic Law, parliamentarians are not bound by orders and instructions and are subject only to their conscience. For the SPD executive this means: “A resolution that forces members of the Bundestag to vote accordingly or exerts considerable pressure on members of parliament and their freedom of election would be a direct intervention in the state sphere, which would also directly qualify as state action and in this sense inadmissible as interference in the free exercise of mandate in accordance with Article 38 of the Basic Law.”
If the party executive took this legal opinion seriously, a party conference of the Social Democratic Party would no longer be able to ask its SPD representatives to vote in a certain way. The party's own executive committee can no longer do this and of course neither can party chairmen Lars Klingbeil and Saskia Esken.
The initiators could appeal to the arbitration committee.
The SPD executive is also aware, of course, that these conclusions are absurd. Referring to a decision of the Federal Constitutional Court from 2013, the SPD executive explains that membership applications “that concern political issues that also affect members of the Bundestag do not per se represent a violation of Article 38 of the Basic Law.” According to the party executive, the only thing that is prohibited is “direct influence on the budget law.”
However, the SPD executive cannot convincingly justify what the special status of the budget law should consist of. The party leadership points out that the budget law “has no direct external impact and certainly does not create legal claims by third parties against the state.” It is completely absurd that this peculiarity could limit the internal democracy of the SPD.
The initiators of the members' petition could now appeal to the SPD's Federal Arbitration Commission if they want to challenge the rejection of their application by legal means. The Federal Arbitration Commission is an internal party court of the SPD. It has not yet been decided whether the DL21 members will take this step.