The AfD provided for a premature end to the Bundestag session on the night of Friday. Before the final decision on an amendment to the Energy Industry Act, the AFD Group questioned Parliament's quorum and then requested a roll-call vote.
In this vote, only 133 parliamentarians voted, which missed the necessary number of 355 MPs. Strictly speaking, the Bundestag only has a quorum if more than half of the 709 members of parliament are present - which, however, is never the case at this nocturnal hour.
The current Bundestag Vice-President Hans-Peter Friedrich (CSU) ended the meeting. In addition to the vote on the Energy Industry Act, with which an EU directive on the internal market in natural gas is to be implemented, several votes on further bills were thus also canceled. These included, inter alia, a social agreement with Ukraine and a redeployment of EU agricultural subsidies for the benefit of nature conservation.
2018 saw the party for the "Hammersprung"
It is not the first time that right-wing populists have noticed such actions in the Bundestag. In January 2018, the party forced a so-called "weaner jump", a special kind of vote.
The term "Hammelsprung" is, according to the Bundestag, a citation from the second half of the 19th century and refers to the counting of votes, in which all deputies leave the plenary hall and enter the hall again through a door marked in each case. They are counted.
In 2018 it came out that instead of the minimum 355 required, only 312 MPs were on the ground. The AfD politician Alexander Gauland said back then that the action was to be understood as a rematch for the non-election of an AfD man in an important body.