After a chaotic first session of the Thuringian state parliament in eastern Germany, after a far-right party won the most votes in the recent elections, the Thuringian Constitutional Court must decide how to proceed.
Chaos erupted on Thursday when the senior lawmaker of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, Jürgen Treutler, refused to respond to requests from other parties to speak, or to table motions or debate changes to procedural rules.
The state’s constitutional court will rule on Friday on an urgent request from the conservative faction of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), in which it says other parties will also participate, to allow other parties to nominate candidates for the presidency of the state parliament.
The hearing was abruptly adjourned due to an impasse over the AfD’s plans to nominate Wiebke Muhsal for the role.
The other parties have dismissed her nomination as a mere provocation, pointing in part to a previous fraud conviction, and she has little chance of winning a majority given the opposition from all other parties.
But the AfD refused to consider changes to the rules that would allow other parties to put forward competing candidates, and instead abruptly suspended the meeting.
The CDU and the newly formed Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) tabled a motion that would allow all parliamentary groups to nominate candidates from the start, but Treutler ignored this, prompting the CDU to accuse him of exceeding his authority.
“This was an attack on parliamentary rights, on the constitution and on every single member of parliament,” said Thuringian CDU leader Mario Voigt.
“What you are doing here is a power grab,” said CDU member Andreas Bühl.
It is not yet clear how the Constitutional Court will decide. The AfD can also do its part. But because it is an urgent matter, the judges will deliberate but decide without an oral hearing, a spokesperson said when asked. While the court is aware of the time pressure, the state parliament cannot determine the time frame for the court, he said.
The constitutional court is expected to make a ruling on Friday at the earliest. As such, the sitting of the state parliament has been postponed until 9:30 am (07:30 GMT) on Saturday, but it is uncertain whether a court decision will have been made by then.
According to lawyer Maximilian Steinbeis, the AfD, as the strongest faction, only has the right to nominate the candidate for the position of president of the state parliament, but not the right to have that candidate elected.
“That is the free decision of the members of the new Thuringian state parliament about who they want to elect as president. And the constitution no longer gives the AfD any rights as the strongest faction,” Steinbeis said on Thursday evening on the evening news of the public broadcaster ZDF.
Steinbeis is the founder of a blog that focuses on constitutional issues and what would happen if “authoritarian populist parties were to gain state power.”
