Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) has taken its place as the Bundestag’s second-largest party in an opening session on Tuesday marred by seat squabbles and insults.
The new parliamentary session, 30 days after the federal election and before a final coalition agreement, saw other parties push back at AfD attempts to flex its muscles.
As election-winner, the centre-right Christian Democratic Union secured the role of parliamentary speaker for ex-minister Julia Klöckner. The largely ceremonial role places her second in Germany’s constitutional league table and before the chancellor.
Klöckner promised to fulfil her duties in a “non-partisan, calm and undaunted” way. She will have her work cut out in the polarised parliament if Tuesday’s lively first session is a taste of things to come.
In line with parliamentary rules, the new Bundestag was opened by veteran leftist Gregor Gysi, a former East German lawyer and politician, as the longest-serving MP.
Gysi used his address to defend his Left Party’s opposition to German defence supports for Ukraine, saying there were “different views on how to achieve peace”.
“Politicians who rely on armaments and deterrence should not be described as warmongers,” he said, while those who demand diplomacy and a new European security architecture should not be denounced as “Putin’s servants”.
The AfD’s 152 deputies began protesting as soon as they entered the parliamentary chamber to find they were missing seven seats. The party protested, too, at other parties’ refusal to back its candidate as one of five deputy speakers. The party took issue in particular with Gysi’s ceremonial role on Tuesday.
He was allowed to speak thanks to a change in rules that previously saw parliament opened by its oldest deputy. Under the old rule, that role would have fallen to Alexander Gauland, the 84-year-old AfD parliamentarian and former party leader.
“Don’t think your tricks can prevent our rise,” Bernd Baumann, AfD parliamentary party leader, said.
His Bundestag grouping has doubled in size and contains a colourful cast of characters including Maximilian Krah. A former MEP, he is moving to Berlin year after telling a journalist he would “never say that anyone who wore an SS uniform was automatically a criminal”.
Krah’s remark led France’s Marine Le Pen to distance her National Rally from the AfD at European level. But Krah shrugged off the controversy last month to top the poll in his constituency in the eastern city of Chemnitz, with 44.2 per cent of the vote.
Another prominent new AfD parliamentarian is Matthias Helferich, who described himself in a leaked internal chat as “the friendly face of the Nazis” – a remark he said later was intended as a joke.
In line with parliamentary procedures, outgoing chancellor Olaf Scholz was officially released from his role on Tuesday afternoon. However, the Social Democratic chancellor was asked to stay on in a caretaker capacity until the Bundestag elects a successor.
The imminent departure of Scholz as a one-term chancellor comes amid difficult coalition talks between the centre-right CDU and the centre-left SPD.
CDU chairman Friedrich Merz, Germany’s chancellor-presumptive, warned the SPD not to forget it was participating in talks as a junior coalition partner. “I think we will have to keep looking at the result of the vote ... the SPD got 16 per cent, we got 28 per cent,” he said.
Merz is under pressure from his backbenchers – as well as voters – to push through a firm reform agenda, a week after backing debt-financed defence and investment spending.
“There is a demand for real reform,” he said, “and I’m under the clear impression that the Social Democrats have understood that too.”
