The Lie Committee
December 23, 2002
A parliamentary committee of inquiry was brought to life on Friday to determine whether Germany’s leaders have been telling lies. The oppositional Christian Democrat-Christian Socialist (CDU/CSU) parliamentary group insisted on establishing the “electoral fraud committee” to substantiate its accusations that the current Social Democrat-Green Party governmental coalition told lies in order to win re-election in September this year.
The body will look into whether and to what extent members of the government gave the parliament and the German public false or incomplete information before the 2002 vote.
"Island of the oblivious"
The CDU/CSU has singled out Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, Finance Minister Hans Eichel and Health Minister Ulla Schmidt for criticism, claiming that the three Social Democrats (SPD) lied about the state of the country’s finances and social welfare system.
In a radio interview on Friday, Peter Altmaier, spokesman for the CDU in the commission, accused Eichel (photo) of making statements about budget gaps after the election that were the opposite of what the minister had said before the election. “The finance minister claims that he was, so to say, taking a holiday on the island of the oblivious,” Altmaier said.
Shortly after the election Eichel revealed that in 2002 Germany would exceed the deficit ceiling of three percent of gross domestic product set by the EU for countries in the euro-zone. Economics experts had already predicted that Germany would violate the regulations before the September election.
Coalition fights back
The SPD and Green Party were unable to prevent the electoral fraud committee’s establishment, since the constitution ensures that founding such a body only requires approval from one-quarter of parliament.
They did, however, push through an additional task for the committee. The body will also consider whether Chancellor Schröder’s government behaved differently from previous German governments going back to 1990 in the way it dealt with predictions and tax estimates. The issue is whether former Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s government coalition -- made up of CDU/CSU and the Free Democrats -- withheld information about the costs of reunification to be re-elected.
The CDU/CSU parliamentary group has announced that the election fraud committee’s broadened mandate violates the law on fact-finding committees by subverting the original aim of the inquiry and drawing out the process. The party is now considering whether to appeal to the German Constitutional Court.
No results expected
The committee’s 11 members got to work on Friday. In the end they are likely to come to different conclusions, since the five Social Democrats, four Christian Democrats and Christian Socialists, the one Free Democrat and the one Green Party member are all looking for something different.
In an interview with the newspaper Bild am Sonntag, German President Johannes Rau called on the government and the opposition to engage in constructive and honest politics and not to use the election fraud committee to damage each other.