[EM] German parliament votes for military support

[Jobst Heitzig]

Minutes ago the german parliament has made a decision that seems
noteworthy for some reasons. I therefore try to submit some additional
information about this decision here.

One week ago, Chancellor Schroeder filed a proposal to give his
administration the executive power to support the international
campaign against terrorism amongst other things by sending several
thousand german troops.

It soon became clear that on the one hand the proposal would get a
large majority in parliament (about 90% were considered to vote for it),
but on the other hand the "yes"-votes of the two factions building the
coalition (social democrats and greens) ALONE would most probably NOT
build a majority. Hence this would have been the second decision the
administration depended on the approval of the opposition.

On monday, the chancellor therefore decided to combine the decision about
the proposal with a vote of confidence ("Vertrauensfrage") - a possibility
included in the constitution. Although three chancellors before him
had asked for a vote of confidence, none of them had coupled this question
with the decision about a factual issue.

Consequently, the 666 representatives today had three possibilities to
vote: a "yes" vote would indicate both approval of the proposal and
confidence in the administration; a "no" vote would indicate disapproval
of the proposal and no confidence in this administration; finally,
abstention. 

If the vote of confidence would not have been passed, there would most  
probably have been new parliamentary elections in february (the
regular elections being in next september instead). In that case,
the greens would perhaps not have met the threshold of 5% to stay in  
parliament, and the social democrats would most probably have build a new
(and stronger) coalition with the FDP (often called the "liberals")
instead. Some people suspect that this was Schroeder's very intention in
coupling the two questions. Another reason could have been that while he
could be quite sure to remain in office when elections would be in
february, he might well have lost power in the september elections.

The effect of his move was this: all of the opposition voted "no" because
of the vote-of-confidence-part of the decision, but some filed an own
proposal for military support in order to be able to express their
approval to that question. 

All but one of the social democrats voted "yes", including those few (they
say about 20 representatives) that would have voted "no" on the pure
factual issue; one representative left the social democratic faction but
kept her seat to vote "no". 

Amongst the greens, there had been 8 out of 37 people that had expressed
the intention to vote "no" before Monday, and they reached an agreement
that four of them would vote "yes" and four would vote "no" in order to
express both confidence in the chancellor and disagreement to the proposal
- knowing that this would result in a very thin majority for the
chancellor. Note that it was not a secret ballot but one by name.

And so it came: 336 voted "yes", 330 voted "no". Ironically, this is a
very good representation of the opinion the *people* had expressed in
polls. 

Some additional peculiarity: Although it was one vote on both questions
simultaneously, the decision *rule* was *not* the same for the two parts:
the factual proposal only needed the simple majority of the votes, that
is, excluding the abstentions, but the vote of confidence needed at least
334 votes to pass. Therefore, if some representatives (of the FDP, say) 
had decided to abstain, this could have had the effect that the factual
porposal would have passed but the vote of confidence not.

Jobst Heitzig