Shanghai puffer agreement

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The Shanghai puffer fish agreement is a fictional international agreement that was included by the party " The Greens " on June 4, 1984 in the tolerance agreement for the formation of the first red-green state government in Hesse .

In June 1984 the SPD and the Greens in Hesse agreed on the election of Holger Börner as Prime Minister through the votes of the SPD and the Greens. In December 1985 it became the first red-green state government. In a nightly round of negotiations, at the request of the Greens, a passage was added that referred to the alleged Shanghai pufferfish agreement of 1974 and - according to the Greens from 2004 - provided for accession to this agreement:

Puffer fish in a restaurant aquarium in Nagoya , Japan
Inflated guinea fowl puffer fish ( Arothron meleagris ) in the American Samoa National Park

"The cases of the linking of work and residence permits are unanimously regarded as settled (Shanghai puffer fish agreement of November 3, 1974)."

Indeed, the puffer fish, valued as a delicacy , has highly poisonous body parts; In Japan, for example, cooks therefore need a special license to prepare the puffer fish, known there as fugu , for which they first have to work for two years in a puffer fish restaurant. The Greens did not dwell on differences between Japan and Germany and claimed - again according to data from 2004 - in the coalition negotiations in general that the fish should only be prepared by specially trained cooks in order to protect consumers . In Germany, however, these chefs were only given temporary residence permits , which all too often led to a difficult search for a new chef in the restaurants concerned. According to the Greens in 2004, the Shanghai puffer fish agreement should provide a remedy by providing for longer periods of residence for the cooks.

In fact, puffer fish are not allowed to be prepared at all in Germany - both the alleged personnel problems of the restaurants and the puffer fish agreement itself were a free invention of the Hessian Greens. Nonetheless, initially neither the SPD representatives nor the lawyers appointed to the examination or the mass media noticed the joke, so that it found its way into the formal coalition agreement.

According to the Hessian Greens (2004), years later, when the prank had long been uncovered, Joschka Fischer received a handwritten letter from his former coalition partner Holger Börner, who had meanwhile become chairman of the SPD-affiliated Friedrich Ebert Foundation , and from a trip to Shanghai wrote: “I'm on the trail of the pufferfish agreement. Best wishes". Later, the Greens continue to report, shortly before the conclusion of the first red-green coalition at the federal level (1998) , Oskar Lafontaine is said to have declared that there would be no blowfish agreement with him under any circumstances.

literature

  • SPD (Ed.): Agreement between SPD and GRÜNEN for the 11th legislative period . Wiesbaden June 4, 1984, Democracy and Law / Aliens Policy, p. 108 , section 2.4 ( hessen.de [PDF; 6.1 MB ]).
  • Richard Meng: Don't stick to the paper - and just no puffer fish . In: Frankfurter Rundschau . October 2, 1998
  • Christoph Risch: Börner pioneer for the Greens . In: Gießener Anzeiger . August 3, 2006
  • Jens Schneider: The puffer fish agreement . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung . 3rd September 2013

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d The Shanghai puffer fish agreement, In: Fraktionsgrün, information sheet of the state parliamentary group in Hesse from Bündnis 90 / Die Grünen, No. 1, May 2004, p. 4 ( Memento from May 6, 2005 in the Internet Archive )
  2. ^ SPD (ed.): Agreement between SPD and GRÜNEN for the 11th legislative period . Wiesbaden June 4, 1984, Democracy and Law / Aliens Policy, p. 108 , section 2.4 ( hessen.de [PDF; 6.1 MB ]).