Parties are not there to get money from the state

Rarely has there been a clumsier attempt by political parties to get hold of state funds – i.e. the money of the citizens. In the summer of 2018, when the soccer World Cup had just started in Russia, the Bundestag, with the votes of the CDU, CSU and SPD, decided to increase the upper limit of the total annual volume of state subsidies for the work of the parties from 165 to 190 million euros.

In the federal election a few months earlier, the Union had achieved its second-worst (32.9 percent) and the Social Democrats (20.5 percent) their worst result since the founding of the Federal Republic. But instead of tightening their belts, they rewarded themselves with millions of euros for the loss of trust.

The course of the legislative process alone – there were only ten days between the submission of the bill to Parliament and the final reading – made the guilty conscience of the members of the grand coalition vis-à-vis the public openly apparent.

The decision of the Federal Constitutional Court on the lawsuit filed by the opposition factions at the time now confirms that the substantive justification was also flimsy. The judges ruled that the alleged costs of "digitization" were not explained in a comprehensible manner either in the draft law or in the parliamentary deliberations.

Especially since mechanization always offers savings potential and state party funding must always be limited to the “indispensable extent to maintain the functionality of the party system”. The state should not give the parties more "than they need to fulfill their tasks in compliance with the requirement of economical use of public funds".

The law is now unconstitutional and void. It is not without effect, it has promoted the already rampant disenchantment with the parties. The current Bundestag would do well to read the decision of the Karlsruhe judges thoroughly.

In the parliamentary democracy of the Basic Law, the formation of political will must take place from the citizens to the state organs - and not the other way around. The creative power of the parties should not be aimed at obtaining state money by fraud, but at rooting them in society. This results in their main sources of income: membership fees and donations.

What lessons can be learned? If the public takes seriously the parties' constitutionally required distance from the state, private donations should probably be less scandalized in the future. The parties must pay back the excess money received.

And the legislature should not only modestly submit to the strict Karlsruhe standards of party financing with the new regulation that is now necessary, but also take another field of action into account:

The all-round support provided by the state for party-affiliated foundations, which has so far been largely freehand, must finally be put on a legal basis. It is in the interests of all parties to rid themselves of accusations of self-service at all levels.

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