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Bärbel Bas
Photo: Jens Krick / picture alliance / Flashpic
The SPD politician Bärbel Bas is to head the Bundestag presidium in the future.
According to SPIEGEL information, the party has agreed on this.
As the strongest parliamentary group in the newly elected Bundestag, the Social Democrats are entitled to the post.
According to this, parliamentary group leader Rolf Mützenich will recommend that the parliamentary group appoint Bas as President of the Bundestag and Aydan Özoğuz as Bundestag Vice-President.
The parliamentary group committee meets at 6 p.m.
With the decision it is clear that Mützenich remains SPD parliamentary group leader.
The party had said that he had the choice of whether to run as President of the Bundestag.
So far, Wolfgang Schäuble (CDU) has headed the six-member body.
The fact that Mützenich had the option to become a candidate for President of Parliament was thanks for his role in the election campaign.
He had kept the parliamentary group calm, even when the SPD held polls around 15 percent for months.
In addition to the two party chairmen Saskia Esken and Norbert Walter-Borjans, the candidate for Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Secretary General Lars Klingbeil, the parliamentary group leader played the central role.
Mützenich is valued across parliamentary groups in the Bundestag.
That spoke in favor of a change of the MP from Cologne to the head of the Bundestag.
There the sometimes uncomfortable representative of the left wing of the party, Scholz, would probably have gotten less in the way as head of government.
But Mützenich's comrades had underestimated the socio-political signal that his appointment as President of the Bundestag would have sent.
Because then the four most important offices in the state would soon be occupied exclusively by men: the Federal President, the Federal Chancellor, the Head of Parliament and the President of the Federal Constitutional Court.
A fatal political sign for a party that calls for the "decade of equality" in its election manifesto.
And so the grumbling increased in the past few days, especially among the SPD women, but not only there.
Most recently, the sociologist Jutta Allmendinger spoke up in SPIEGEL and called on the SPD parliamentary group to "become aware of the social significance and even explosive power of the upcoming decision to nominate the office of President of the Bundestag."
The Social Democratic women themselves had no candidate for the parliamentary group chairmanship, which in the event of a change would probably have gone to Mützenich Vice Michael Miersch.
But for the office of President of the Bundestag.
Mützenich has now given in to this pressure.
For him, however, the decision does not mean defeat.
The office of head of the largest parliamentary group is politically more important and more diverse than that of the President of Parliament.
And he was not showing any official fatigue as a parliamentary group leader.
His deputy Miersch, who had the greatest hopes for the successor to Mützenich, now has to wait again.
That shouldn't lead to any dissonance, Miersch is considered a loyal party soldier.
More soon at SPIEGEL.de
ham / ulz
