Group (parliament)

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A group is an amalgamation of several members of the German Bundestag or another parliament that has fewer rights than a parliamentary group .

General

The minimum number of MPs required to form a group and the rights of the group are regulated differently in the parliaments. The legal stipulations can be found in the respective rules of procedure of the relevant parliament or in a separate parliamentary group law. Members of the group who do not have a parliamentary group can join together. In the Hamburg Citizenship , a group must be large enough to be entitled to at least one committee mandate.

The rights of a group always lag behind those of a faction. The rules of procedure of the German Bundestag do not contain any more detailed regulations in this regard; rather, the Bundestag lays down the group's rights in detail when it recognizes the group. In contrast, the Hamburg Fraction Act regulates in detail the group's right to representation in the committees and also to proportional funding in accordance with the regulations for the parliamentary groups. According to Section 11 of the Rhineland-Palatinate Fraction Act, associations of non-attached MPs are financed by the state following a resolution by the state parliament. Special rights of the groups are justified if and to the extent that the groups and parliamentary groups, through their coordinating function within parliament, simultaneously promote the working capacity of parliament as a whole.

Groups in the German Bundestag

The rules of procedure of the German Bundestag have provided for groups since January 1952 (at the same time the minimum size of a parliamentary group was increased to 15 members). The first group was made up of the 14 parliamentarians of the Communist Party of Germany - another KPD member was imprisoned in the GDR. An unofficial group of national rights already existed from the constitution , which later renamed itself to the group of the German Reich Party; its members joined other parliamentary groups except for one in late 1950. The faction of the Economic Construction Association (WAV) lost its faction status in October 1950 and also referred to itself as a group until December 1951 . From April 1953 until the constitution of the new Bundestag, five members of the WAV again formed a group.

In the second German Bundestag a group of former members of was founded on July 14, 1955 GB / BHE fraction, the so-called Group strength / Oberlander . All members joined the CDU / CSU parliamentary group as guests on the following day . On March 15, 1956 14 deputies from the stepped FDP and formed the group Association of Free Democrats , and later Democratic Association or parliamentary group of the Free People's Party . From October 26, 1956, it had 15 members and thus parliamentary group status. It also formed a technical working group with the DP faction, with which it ultimately merged.

In the 3rd German Bundestag, the DP parliamentary group lost its parliamentary group status on July 1, 1960 when nine members left, the remaining six members formed a group. In 1961 more MPs resigned from the DP, the three remaining members of the party now known as GDP remained non-attached.

At the beginning of the 5th electoral term, the minimum size of a parliamentary group was set at five percent of the MPs.

The 24 members of the PDS , who belonged to the 11th German Bundestag after reunification from October 3, 1990, formed a group.

In the 12th German Bundestag (1990–94), Alliance 90 / Greens with eight seats and the PDS with 17 seats each formed a group. The latter again formed a group in the 13th German Bundestag (1994–98) with 30 seats.

The two PDS MPs Gesine Lötzsch and Petra Pau , who were elected directly to the 15th Bundestag in the 2002 Bundestag election, were refused recognition as a group due to the small size of the planned group.

Groups in German state parliaments

The article Group status in German state parliaments gives an overview of the state parliaments in which the formation of groups is planned .

In the state parliament of Brandenburg , the three members of the BVB / FW fought for group rights before the Brandenburg Constitutional Court in summer 2016 . The BVB / FW moved into the state parliament in autumn 2014 through the basic mandate clause . The group disbanded in September 2017.

After the transition of an SPD MP from October 2013 to June 2015, there was a two-member group of Citizens in Anger (BIW) in the Bremen citizenship . From June 2017 to June 2019 there was a BIW group of three members of parliament, two of whom had joined the BIW. Before that, after the 2015 mayor elections from June 2015 to June 2017, there was an AfD group of four members, which was later renamed Bremer Bürgerliche Reformer and, with one member less, the ALFA -Gruppe-Bremen or the Liberal-Conservative Reformers group . Three months after the 2019 general election, three of the five AfD MPs resigned from the AfD parliamentary group at the beginning of September and formed the AfD group in the Bremen citizenship .

In the Schleswig-Holstein state parliament , the group of the South Schleswig Voters' Association, representing the Danish minority in Germany, has the rights of a parliamentary group. From 1958 to 1962 and from 1996 to 2009 the SSW was represented with fewer than the number of MPs normally required to form a parliamentary group, but with more than one MP. The same has been true since 2012.

In many state parliaments, however, no special status is provided for groups. The members of the Blue Party from 2017 to 2019 in the Saxon state parliament (5 members) and in the state parliament of North Rhine-Westphalia (3 members) referred to themselves as the Blue Group , but were not officially recognized as a group by the respective parliament.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Section 10 (4) of the Rules of Procedure of the German Bundestag
  2. ↑ a b § 6 of the Hamburg parliamentary group law
  3. ↑ General information on group formation and group rights on the Bundestag website ( Memento from October 30, 2013 in the Internet Archive )
  4. ↑ Section 11 of the Rhineland-Palatinate parliamentary group law
  5. ↑ Recommendation for a resolution and report on the rejection of recognition by the Lötzsch / Pau group, BT-Drs. 15/2114 (PDF; 257 kB)
  6. ↑ Constitutional judges strengthen free voters in the state parliament ( memento from November 1, 2016 in the Internet Archive ), rbb-online.de , July 22, 2016.
  7. ↑ The SSW designates itself as the “Landtag group”: [1] March 1, 2000, [2] April 6, 2005, [3] June 8, 2012, ssw-sh.de, accessed on August 9, 2019.
  8. ↑ Rules of Procedure of the Schleswig-Holstein State Parliament. gesetze-rechtsprechung.sh.juris.de, accessed on October 5, 2017 .