[ad_1]
meIt took exactly twenty minutes for Wolfgang Schäuble to call for order. The first plenary session of the Bundestag since the President of the Bundestag ordered a mask requirement had started at 1 pm Wednesday. The questioning of Chancellor Heiko Maas was on the agenda. However, on the unofficial agenda was how to deal with the mask requirement, which Schäuble had ordered for the Bundestag buildings due to the increasing number of corona infections effective from Tuesday.
At 1:20 pm, AfD deputy Franziska Gminder entered the room under the Reichstag dome. She did not cover her prescribed mouth and nose on the way to her own seat. Shortly before the start of the session, the vice president of the Bundestag, Wolfgang Kubicki, said in an interview with the FAZ that in such a case there would be a friendly warning first.
Now, Wolfgang Schäuble occasionally cultivates a form of friendship that mixes with elements of toughness. In a shrill voice, he pointed out the mask requirement to AfD MPs. In the event of a violation, he could issue a call to order, he threatened Schäuble, but added that he had not yet been. The directed fiddled with his mask without putting it on until he reached his seat. There duty expired.
But the theater was not over yet. Gminder’s friend from the party, Beatrix von Storch, who had also not entered the room wearing a mask, but had played with it, shouted from her seat in the direction of the President of the Bundestag that he himself was not wearing a mask. Schäuble had enough: “Mrs. Von Storch, I’m calling you to order.”
But instead of pointing out that the president who is sitting and presiding over the meeting can do so without a mask according to the general decree that he himself has issued, Schäuble said, to justify the call to order: “Because the president should not be criticized.” .
Masks are provocatively omitted
Bundestag and Federal Government, President and Federal Chancellor: Like the rest of the population, everyone must learn to cope with the side effects of the pandemic. The mask is the most visible sign of this, and in Parliament the different beliefs about wearing a mask are most evident. You have stepped into the political dispute, which can easily be reduced to the denominator: the AfD against the others.
Initially, Schäuble only made an “urgent recommendation” to wear protection for the mouth and nose. Later, however, there were more and more complaints that AfD parliamentarians and employees did not adhere to this recommendation. Kubicki describes last week’s discussions in the Council of Elders in such a way that especially Greens and leftists complained that AfD MPs and employees were walking provocatively without masks. Representatives of both groups had called for a stricter approach. “The other parliamentary groups, with the exception of the AfD, of course, joined in this stance,” Kubicki reports.
Schäuble had already complained in a press release on Monday that the mask recommendation “was not being observed everywhere” and justified his move with it. Anyone walking through the Bundestag buildings without mouth and nasal protection can, in extreme cases, face a fine of up to 25,000 euros or a fine of up to 5,000 euros. According to Kubicki, employees and members of parliament are treated differently. They face a fine, this call to order, a fine or even exclusion from the meeting.
Kubicki himself doesn’t seem enthusiastic, but sees no other option. “You can put up with what you want with the new regulations on the wearing of masks in Bundestag buildings. But if it exists, then you have to stick with it. Or you have to change it ”. The AfD announced that it would take legal action against the new rules.
