The Green party has accused the black-red coalition of acting in a manner close to work refusal. Their concerns stem from the volume of initiatives submitted to the Bundestag by the black-red coalition and the overall workload of the parliament. Irene Mihalic, the Green party’s parliamentary head, told the “Welt” that since the summer of last year, the federal government has announced major reforms, yet parliament has not achieved anything concrete in relation to them. She noted that the plenary sessions are currently shorter than usual because the coalition is proposing so few laws. Mihalic pointed to the previous week as another low point, where the coalition proposed the same number of initiatives as the Greens did as a single parliamentary group. While she conceded that sessions ending at 6 PM might be good for work-life balance, she stated that the expectation for parliamentarians should be different.
Available Bundestag statistics covering the first eleven months since Friedrich Merz (CDU) was sworn in as Chancellor show that the black-red cabinet, along with the Union and SPD factions, have submitted significantly more initiatives to the Bundestag than the traffic-light government led by Olaf Scholz (SPD), comprised of the SPD, the Greens, and the FDP, during the same period. The Merz government presented 156 government bills to the Bundestag in the specified time frame, compared to 84 from the Scholz cabinet. The Union and SPD factions have collectively submitted 22 initiatives to date, while the traffic-light factions submitted 43 initiatives in their first eleven months.
Dirk Wiese, a Bundestag member who was part of the traffic-light coalition, criticized the Greens for accusing the black-red government of work refusal, calling it “a bad joke”. Wiese, who is now the parliamentary head of the SPD faction, argued that during the time under the traffic-light government, it was difficult to determine who was the greater obstacle to necessary reforms-the Greens or the FDP. He claimed that the decision-making processes within the Greens were often so confusing that it was unclear whether an agreed decision would hold. He lamented that agreements were frequently overturned “from above”. Wiese concluded by stating that collaboration with the Union faction functions better and more professionally.
Steffen Bilger, the first parliamentary head of the Union faction, also told the “Welt” that the accusation of “work refusal” is groundless. He characterized the black-red alignment as a “working coalition” stating that the numbers prove this clearly: in the first eleven months, they submitted 50 more initiatives to the Bundestag than the traffic-light government in the comparative period. Bilger based this on the total number of government bills submitted to both the Bundestag and the Bundesrat, counting 170 for the black-red side versus 90 for the traffic-light side. Regarding the claim that plenary sessions sometimes ended early, Bilger countered that it is “not normal for the Bundestag to regularly sit until midnight or later”. For him, what matters is the final decision reached.
