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Third woman in this office: Bundestag President Bärbel Bas
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Michael Kappeler / dpa
Wolfgang Kubicki, of all people. When the newly elected President of the Bundestag Bärbel Bas from the SPD reads out the list of candidates for the vice-presidential post, she made a first small faux pas. She forgets the candidate of the FDP, the only man who will be a member of the Bundestag presidium in the future: Wolfgang Kubicki, 69. "You could almost think that was on purpose," Bas corrects himself quick-wittedly, only to apologize to Kubicki. At least now it is clear that with the new President, a new tone will move into the German Bundestag.
Half an hour earlier, Bas was elected president by a large majority, the 53-year-old health politician who was only known to a narrow circle of specialist politicians until she was nominated. Bas is not sitting up there on the podium because her previous career would have predestined her for the office. She was chosen because the SPD needed a woman. Because the Social Democrats want to appoint the Chancellor and the Federal President and claim that they are socio-politically up to date.
Bärbel Bas makes what can be seen as her deficits - chosen only as a woman, too little intellectual profile - aggressively from the start into the program. Right at the beginning of her first 15-minute speech, she follows the tradition of her predecessor Annemarie Renger. The Social Democrat was the first woman elected to office in 1972, the first woman in the world to head a parliament. Renger said at the time that she had proposed herself to the SPD parliamentary group for the office of President of the Bundestag. "Do you think I would have been taken otherwise?"
Bas calls Renger's choice a “turning point”, today society is “a little further”.
But she, too, is only the third woman in this post - since 1949. "That is not glorious." Bas sees it as her special task as President of the Bundestag that responsibility in the country is distributed more fairly between women and men.
A new style and the spirit of the past
With Bas, a new style should move into the second highest office in the state.
Wolfgang Schäuble has just given his last speech, as old age president he opened the constituent session.
And disciplined to the end, the 79-year-old did not allow himself any sentimentality when saying goodbye to the office that he would have liked to continue to hold.
Bas, on the other hand, shows feelings and "gladly accepts" the choice. Before she takes the floor for the first time, she breathed deeply, visible and audible for everyone. In her address she openly mourns Thomas Oppermann, the SPD parliamentary group chairman who suddenly died a year ago: "He's missing." She shows how proud she is to be elected to such a high state office as the “first child” in her hometown Duisburg. "I had to get rid of that."
Before that, Wolfgang Schäuble rolled down the ramp that was specially built for him from his place on the Presidium into Parliament. He looked small and gray in his wheelchair while Barbel Bas in a bright red jacket was waiting upstairs to begin her speech. Schäuble joined the Bank of the Union, now a simple member of parliament, for almost 50 years in the Bundestag, while the other protagonists of the Merkel era were already sitting upstairs in the visitors' gallery: the Chancellor, ministers and, in the first row, next to the Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier also Schäuble's wife. The constituent session of the Bundestag is the moment when the old and the new meet, especially when it is accompanied by a change of government.
In Schäuble's speech you could already hear the future opposition politician speaking a little.
Schäuble put the dispute at the center.
"This is the place where we can argue, where we should argue," he said, speaking of the "fascination of the great, contentious debate", praising the "diversity of opinions" and warning against an "urge for conformity".
It was a solid, but not a big speech, seldom interrupted by applause, also because Schäuble hardly gave the pauses for it.
As if he wanted to get it over with.
It was as if time had passed over him, a ghost of the past.
At 1.30 p.m. Schäuble spoke the sentence, which meant a turning point, for him personally and for the country: "Madam President, please take over the office."
Bas then sets clearly different accents in her speech. The woman, who first graduated from secondary school and then worked her way up through professional training, stands out from the ranks of her thirteen predecessors. With one exception, all of them have doctorates, four of them even had Prof. Dr. in front of the name: Norbert Lammert, Rita Süßmuth, Karl Carstens and Eugen Gerstenmaier. Schäuble and Lammert in particular had a reputation for intellectual brilliance and verbal power.
Bas, on the other hand, mainly urges comprehensibility and calls for an "understandable policy". She warns that the citizens no longer feel they are being addressed by politics, and warns the MPs not to hide behind political "technical jargon", behind the opinion of experts. "We have to speak the language that is understood in our country." The Bundestag should take care of the middle of society. The new President of the Bundestag demands respect for the citizens from the MPs and, conversely, from the citizens but also respect for the Parliament.
Both Schäuble and Bas indirectly address the changed atmosphere in the Bundestag since the AfD entered parliament. Bas demands an appropriate tone when dealing with one another. "We're not here to insult ourselves personally," she says, and for this passage, of all things, receives applause from the ranks of the AfD: "Hate and agitation is not an opinion." Before that, Schäuble distinguished himself from identity politics, calling it one »Erroneous idea« that social groups can only be represented by their own members. "We MEPs do not represent through our person, but through our politics," he said. And also received applause from the right margin for this.
And something else connects the old and the new on this day: Both are calling for an electoral reform to prevent the Bundestag from being inflated any further.
Schäuble spoke of a "personally bitter experience".
The reform "obviously does not tolerate any delay," he said, looking at the crowded MPs.
Bas calls on the political groups to put the issue on the agenda.
We finally need a reform "that deserves the name."