Imperative mandate
An imperative mandate is a mandate in which a member of parliament is bound by the substantive requirements of the persons he represents. This can mean both the obligation of a delegate to bind him to the party affiliations sending him and that of a representative to the direct will of the voting citizen . If the mandate holder does not follow the line of the organizational structure sending him or the will of the voters, he can be removed.
Comparison with the free mandate
The imperative mandate is opposed to the free mandate , in which the members of parliament, as Art. 38 of the German Basic Law expresses, are “not bound by orders and instructions”. The constitutions of Switzerland , Austria and most of the other representative Western democracies also prescribe a free mandate.
Sections of the labor movement prefer the imperative mandate. Council democracies are based on it.
MPs with an imperative mandate are much more dependent on their voters. However, the view is taken that it is much more difficult to reach compromises with other elected representatives if too much indulgence can lead to immediate deselection.
history
The term originated at the end of the 19th century in the Third French Republic . This was in response also to the dejected Paris Commune and the Soviet democracy , first as a compromise between the rival monarchist tendencies of Legitimists and Orleanist as merely "temporary" republic to finding established technologies approved by two currents heir. While the (French and international) workers' movement drew the lesson from the experiences of council democracy that there could be no (real) republic without an imperative mandate, the constitution of this "temporary" republic, conversely, anchored a ban on the imperative mandate. This ban was incorporated into many later constitutions.
Imperative mandates existed in the council democracy in the early days of the Soviet Union and some other short-lived revolutionary governments during this period.
Federal Council
In the German Federal Council , the individual members are not free to vote. Membership in the Federal Council is constitutionally neither a “free mandate” nor an “imperative mandate”; the members of the Federal Council act according to a uniform basic line developed jointly in the cabinet of their respective federal state . They represent their State and may cast their votes in accordance with Art. 51 para. 3 sentence 2 GG only give uniform. If they deliberately do not do this, the prevailing opinion is that all votes of the federal state concerned will be invalid, see the judgment of the Federal Constitutional Court on the 2002 Immigration Act .
See also
Individual evidence
- ^ A b Frieder Otto Wolf : imperative mandate . In: Historical-Critical Dictionary of Marxism . tape 6 / I , 2004, Sp. 837-847 ( inkrit.org [PDF]).
- ↑ BVerfG , judgment of December 18, 2002, Az. 2 BvF 1/02, BVerfGE 106, 310
