Pairing Agreement
Pairing agreements or pairing agreements are parliamentary agreements between government and opposition factions. They stipulate that for every member of the government who is sick, professionally or otherwise urgently unable to attend, a member of the opposition does not vote in parliament. This “fairness agreement” is intended to preserve the parliamentary balance of power, i.e. the majority of the parliamentary groups in charge of the government . In some cases, the procedure is not agreed in general, but only for certain votes or for entire days of meetings between the parliamentary leaders of the groups. For important votes that decide the future of the government, the absence of MPs is sometimes ignored. The use of this Anglicism is documented in Germany from 1978.
The pairing, which originally came from the British Parliament and was practiced there until 1997, relates in Germany to the area of freedom of assignment and instruction under Article 38 (1) sentence 2 of the Basic Law . According to this, representatives of the whole people are not bound by orders and instructions and are only subject to their conscience. Due to the non-binding nature of the agreement, it can be terminated at any time. For this reason it is constitutionally permissible. The pairing agreement thus finds its limit at the free mandate , since no MP can be forced to stay away from parliamentary sessions. Compliance with the agreement is therefore not legally enforceable.
Pairing agreements can be terminated at any time by either party. In 2002, for example, the opposition union of the red-green coalition terminated a pairing agreement because of the dispute over the occupation of a second vice post in the Bundestag presidium. Britta Altenkamp , the parliamentary managing director of the SPD parliamentary group in the state parliament of North Rhine-Westphalia , resigned from her position on July 3, 2011 because she had terminated a pairing agreement two days earlier and thus triggered a scandal. On June 15, 2012, the SPD and the Greens brought significantly more MPs to the Bundestag session than agreed under the pairing agreement, so that the majority of the votes were unclear. When then arranged Hammelsprung the opposition MPs stood outside the Chamber, so that the hall a majority of the MPs was, thus, the Bundestag was a quorum and the session had to be closed. The opposition prevented the first reading of the controversial draft law on childcare allowance , which was later on the agenda.
One of the most recent agreements concerned the Lower Saxony state parliament , in which an FDP member abstained from voting because the member of the Green parliamentary group Julia Willie Hamburg was unable to vote between September 2013 and July 2014 due to a heart disease.
criticism
Pairing agreements are sometimes criticized as "not voting" and as an "instrument of conventional power structures". In 2012, the pirate faction in the Schleswig-Holstein state parliament rejected a corresponding agreement on the grounds that parliamentary majorities should "be formed from the free conviction of all representatives without being compulsory." In the case of factual voting behavior based solely on the conscience of the MPs, the division of the representatives into coalition and opposition is outdated. They are not a “majority procurer” and see it as a voter mandate to “also use random opportunities such as preventing a coalition member to serve the Schleswig-Holsteiners or to prevent damage from them.”
literature
- Marcus Schuldei: The Pairing Agreement , Duncker & Humblot, 1997, ISBN 3-428-08969-3
- Sandra Henkenötter: Pairing in the German Bundestag - The revival of an old parliamentary practice to secure a majority , in: Journal for Legislation (ZG) 1995, pp. 328–344.
Individual evidence
- ↑ DerWesten: Rot-Grün and CDU in NRW come to an agreement at WestLB from June 30, 2011, accessed on July 3, 2011
- ↑ T-Online.de ( page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved July 2, 2011
- ↑ Wz-newsline.de accessed on July 2, 2011
- ↑ Wdr.de accessed on July 2, 2011
- ↑ Netzeitung.de ( memento from September 6, 2012 in the web archive archive.today ) accessed on July 2, 2011
- ↑ Broder Carstensen, Ulrich Busse: Anglicisms Dictionary: The Influence of English on German Vocabulary After 1945, 2001, ISBN 3-11-017169-4 , page 1023, online
- ↑ Hans-Peter Schneider, Wolfgang Zeh: Parliamentary Law and Parliamentary Practice in the Federal Republic of Germany , Pairing Agreement, p. 671, Gruyter, 1989, ISBN 3-11-011077-6
- ↑ Felix Stephan Möhrle: The rules of procedure of the National Council in comparison with the rules of procedure of the German Bundestag with special consideration of minority rights and the rights of the individual MP , p. 65, dissertation (PDF; 1.7 MB)
- ↑ Spiegel: Coalition Discipline - Majority, Stand! November 14, 2002 Retrieved July 4, 2011
- ↑ RP-Online - Dramatic Lessons for Power , accessed July 4, 2011
- ↑ Bundestag.de - Quorum ( Memento of the original from July 17, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed June 16, 2012
- ↑ sueddeutsche.de - Black-Yellow is embarrassed about the care allowance , accessed on June 16, 2012
- ↑ Press release of May 24, 2012 ( Memento of the original of July 31, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed July 10, 2013.
