Coalition committee

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The coalition committee is an informal body of a German government coalition made up of party-political and executive leaders from the federal and, in some cases , the state level . In principle, coalition committees have the task of coordinating the cooperation between coalition partners in the government , in the Bundestag and, if possible, in the Bundesrat .

Depending on the coalition agreement , committee meetings are convened regularly or only in the event of special differences between the actors involved. In practice, there were also ad hoc committee meetings. Members of coalition committees are usually representatives of the government, the parliamentary groups and the parties that run the government .

It is the concern of the members of coalition committees, on the one hand, to represent the respective views and, on the other hand, to enforce agreements reached in the coalition committee with the help of the authority of the committee members in the formal bodies. The coalition committee itself, on the other hand, is not an official state body and therefore has no legal powers.

history

The establishment of a coalition committee as a steering body was planned for the first time at the federal level after the successful government formation negotiations between CDU / CSU and FDP in 1961 and was fixed in writing in a coalition agreement.

criticism

Coalition committees "have developed into an informal decision-making body with extensive competencies" and therefore function as a kind of unofficial decision-making body, but without being mentioned in the Basic Law . Since coalition committees de facto control the work of the government and parliamentary majority in phases without being directly responsible to the Bundestag, the decisions made by coalition committees are viewed as negatively critical from a democratic theoretical point of view. They are accused of governing “past parliament” and “in the back room ”.

Members

The current coalition committee includes:

See also:

swell

  1. ↑ cf. Wolfgang Rudzio : Informal governance - coalition management of the Merkel government. In: From Politics and Contemporary History . APuZ 16/2008, p. 11f.
  2. ^ Sabine Kropp : Governing as an informal process. The coalition management of the red-green federal government. In: From Politics and Contemporary History. B 43/2003, pp. 23-31.
  3. ↑ Waldemar Schreckenberger : Informal procedure for preparing decisions between the federal government and the majority parliamentary groups: coalition talks and coalition rounds. In: Journal for Parliamentary Issues . 3/1994, p. 334.
  4. ↑ Frederik A. Petersohn: On the importance of informalization and party politicization in the process of formulating politics in the Federal Republic of Germany. Münster et al. 2000, ISBN 3-8258-4580-X , pp. 31-36.
  5. ^ Wichard Woyke : Coalition. In: Uwe Andersen, Wichard Woyke (Ed.): Concise dictionary of the political system of the Federal Republic of Germany. Bonn 2003, ISBN 3-89331-389-3 , p. 275.
  6. ↑ Stephan Bröchler, Timo Grunden (Ed.): Informal Politics . 2014, doi : 10.1007 / 978-3-658-02380-5 ( springer.com [accessed August 25, 2020]).
  7. ↑ Jonas Schaible: Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer - a woman pulls through. t-online.de, July 17, 2019, accessed on July 17, 2019 .
  8. ↑ Interim solution sought: Nahles is going - who is coming? In: tagesschau.de. Norddeutscher Rundfunk, June 3, 2019, accessed on June 17, 2019 .
  9. ↑ Denis Huber / dpa / afp : Green parliamentary group in the Bundestag confirms Göring-Eckardt and Hofreiter as dual leadership. In: GMX .de. 1 & 1 Mail & Media GmbH, September 24, 2019, accessed on September 24, 2019 .