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German Bundestag
Photo: Christoph Soeder / DPA
The left parliamentary group is pushing for a quick tightening of the secondary employment regulations for members of parliament.
In a letter from the parliamentary director Jan Korte to all other parliamentary directors of the parliamentary groups apart from the AfD, he calls for a joint approach.
"With a joint initiative by all democratic parliamentary groups in this matter, the Bundestag could send out a strong signal in this politically important year," says the letter that SPIEGEL has received.
The Left had already presented a bill that provides for a law to prohibit members of parliament from doing paid outside work as lobbyists.
The final vote should actually take place in plenary this week.
With votes from the grand coalition, however, the agenda item was surprisingly canceled in the Rules of Procedure committee last Thursday and the vote was postponed.
Shortly after the mask affairs became known, the SPD and Union voted against tightening the laws.
Former CDU MP Nikolas Löbel and ex-CSU politician Georg Nüßlein are at the center of the enrichment scandal in the procurement of corona protective masks.
Both are said to have collected hundreds of thousands of euros separately for threading mask deals, as SPIEGEL had revealed, among other things.
After increasing public pressure, Löbel last resigned his parliamentary mandate and left the CDU.
Nüßlein, on the other hand, resigned offices and resigned from the CSU, but has so far held on to his mandate in the Bundestag.
"Since the Amthor affair, the CDU / CSU and SPD have not done anything"
Jan Korte, parliamentary executive director of the Left
"Since we know that for ideological reasons the Union cannot approve even the best motions from the left, in this case we would be ready to withdraw our bill in favor of an intergroup bill banning the paid lobbying of MPs," Korte now writes.
“It is a scandal within a scandal that the governing coalition is using procedural tricks to delay the vote on a bill for an opposition faction.
The CDU / CSU and SPD have not done anything since the Amthor affair, "Korte told SPIEGEL.
"If the CDU / CSU and SPD do not follow our proposal for a joint initiative, they should at least position themselves in plenary on our proposal instead of shirking the vote."
SPD presents 10-point plan
The SPD now also wants "extensive legal tightening in the areas of lobby registers, transparency rules, criminal law and party financing," according to a 10-point plan that the Bundestag member Matthias Bartke published on Tuesday.
Specifically, the Social Democrats are calling for the bribery and corruption of members of parliament to no longer be classified as an offense but as a crime.
The minimum sentence should therefore be one year imprisonment.
In addition, the MPs should state precisely how many hours they have been in secondary employment and what income they have earned through dividends, lobbying activities in addition to the mandate or through company investments.
The SPD demands that the additional earnings be published "in exact amount (in euros and cents)".
According to the SPD's plans, party donations are to be capped at 100,000 euros per donor per year.
For more transparency, the obligation to publish party donations is to be reduced from 10,000 euros to 2,000 euros.
"Our coalition partner is well advised if he no longer blocks our proposals," said the SPD's letter.
The Greens also called on the other parties to discuss stricter transparency rules.
"While people and companies are suffering from the pandemic, members of the CDU / CSU enrich themselves by brokering mask deals," wrote the First Parliamentary Managing Director of the Green Group, Britta Haßelmann, and Federal Managing Director Michael Kellner in a letter to their counterparts at the CDU, CSU, SPD, FDP and left.
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