Bundestag (Austria)

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The session room of the Bundestag in the parliament building in Vienna . During the monarchy, the manor house of the Cisleithan Imperial Council , and then the National Council between 1920 and 1933, met here. During the Second World War , the hall fell victim to a bomb attack and was restored as a National Council meeting room after 1945. (Source: Federal Archives)

The Bundestag was a legislative body in Austria set up under the Austro-Fascist system of the corporate state . In the authoritarian system of the Dollfuss -Regimes, previously the National Council and the Constitutional Court turned off , had the Bundestag the draft laws the federal government served almost exclusively to formal confirmation. It was established by the May constitution of 1934 and did not correspond to any parliament in the democratic sense. Its end came with the “ connection “Austria to the German Reich on March 12, 1938.

composition

The Bundestag was composed of members of the so-called “preliminary advisory bodies”, of which the State Council and the Federal Economic Council each sent 20 members, the Federal Culture Council ten and the State Council nine. The representatives of the state council in the Bundestag were directly appointed by the state governors .

Competencies

In accordance with the authoritarian nature of the new constitution, the competencies of the Bundestag are very narrow:

"The Bundestag is responsible for making decisions:
1. on bills from the federal government, relating to laws in the material sense;
2. on bills from the federal government that relate to:
a) the federal budget;
b) the inclusion or conversion of federal bonds;
c) the disposal of federal assets;
3. on drafts of the federal government, regarding law-amending treaties and treaties that oblige the federal government to enact laws.
4. on submissions from the Court of Auditors regarding the approval of the federal accounts;
5. on reports from the Court of Auditors. (Art. 51) "

The final decision in the legislative procedure was formally intended for the Bundestag, according to Article 44 of the May Constitution:

"Federal legislation is exercised by the Bundestag (decision-making body) after preliminary deliberation on the draft bills by the State Council, the Federal Culture Council, the Federal Economic Council and the State Council (preliminary advisory bodies)."

The possibilities of the Bundestag to intervene in the legislative process, however, were extremely limited. For example, he had no right of initiative , because that was solely with the federal government. In the Bundestag, most of the proposals (Art. 51 Para. 1/3) were not allowed to introduce any or only limited amendments. In these cases, a negotiation on the matter was not planned. The authoritarian constitution determined the treatment of bills proposed by the federal government in the Bundestag:

“There will be no further negotiation. The Bundestag decides by voting on the unchanged acceptance of the bill or its rejection. "(Art. 62 para. 3 sentence 3f.)

In most cases, the Bundestag only had the option of accepting or rejecting a legislative initiative by the government. However, the Bundestag never made use of the possibility of a rejection, as it was made up of loyal representatives of the Unity Party of the Fatherland Front . In the event of a rejection by the Bundestag, however, the Federal Government could have overcome its veto by means of a referendum. The government was also able to bypass the regular legislative process at any time by means of emergency ordinance, which it actually did in most legislative cases.

The executive of the federal government was also only partially responsible to the Bundestag. The Bundestag could charge the Federal Government or individual members of its members for violations of the law, but the government did not have a political responsibility towards legislation in the sense of a majority of confidence. In no case was the Federal President responsible for his behavior.

The Bundestag in the Austrofascist system

The limited role that the Bundestag was supposed to play in the political structure of the corporate state resulted from the negative attitude of the regime and, above all, of the paramilitary home defenses towards parliamentarianism . Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuß had already formulated this in his trotting course speech on September 11, 1933. The Heimwehr had previously rejected democracy in the Korneuburg Oath on May 18 :

"We reject Western democratic parliamentarism and the party state!"

The authoritarian federal constitution was designed in a conscious departure from the previous representative-democratic system of the federal constitutional law . The Bundestag did not even use its modest control and approval rights and thus merely represented an instrument of acclamation of government policy that was typical of authoritarian systems and that could be used for propaganda purposes.

literature

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Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Quoted from Wiltschegg (1985), pp. 255f.