Germany will amend its constitution to protect the independence of its supreme court, amid concerns over potential efforts by far-right parties to disrupt its functions.
The proposals, agreed by all the mainstream parties, are designed to “safeguard the independence and viability” of the constitutional court, the justice ministry said.
Marco Buschmann, justice minister, described the court as the “bulwark of our liberal democracy”, adding that its “protective shield must be made more resilient”.
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The initiative has been triggered by mounting alarm in Berlin over attacks on the judiciary in some eastern European countries. In Poland the ultraconservative PiS government, which was in power from 2015 to 2023, packed the country’s constitutional court with political appointees and passed laws that critics said undermined the separation of powers between branches of government.
“In eastern Europe we were unfortunately forced to see how quickly the rule of law could be dismantled, and in many cases the first step was to paralyse the constitutional courts,” said Johannes Fechner, a senior Social Democrat MP.
That had been done, he said, using “an array of different tricks” such as creating a new “senate” of the court, or reducing the retirement age for judges, thereby creating vacancies that could be filled with “their own, acceptable people”. He added: “We want to prevent that from happening.”
Germany has also been highly critical of the judicial overhaul pushed by Benjamin Netanyahu’s rightwing government in Israel, which included measures to give his governing coalition more control over the appointment of judges. Critics have called it a politically motivated assault on Israel’s system of checks and balances.
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“We are living in a systemic conflict between democracies and autocratic dictatorships and we have to make our democracy more powerful and more resilient so it can better counter these attacks,” said Konstantin von Notz, a senior Green MP.
The proposals will anchor some of the rules relating to Germany’s top court in the country’s constitution, such as those stipulating that judges have only a 12-year term, that they must retire at the age of 68 and that there is a total of 16 judges on the court.
Rules stipulating that the Karlsruhe-based court has only two senates or panels, that judges cannot be re-elected, and that the court has the freedom to manage its own affairs without external interference will also be enshrined in the basic law.
The parties also agreed to introduce new procedures to resolve a situation when parliament is unable to fill a vacant position on the court. Under current rules, a judge is only elected if a two-thirds majority of MPs support his or her candidacy.
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Legislators fear a situation where a far-right party like the Alternative for Germany could become so strong that it would be able to block judicial appointments in parliament, in a bid to paralyse the court.
But Buschmann said the proposals address this issue. “In such a scenario we want to establish a replacement election mechanism,” he added. This would involve the upper house of parliament stepping in to elect a judge if the lower house cannot muster a two-thirds majority for the appointment.
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The proposed reforms are unusual in having the support of opposition parties as well as the government. They were devised by members of the three parties in Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s coalition — the Social Democrats, Greens and liberals — as well as the main opposition, the conservative Christian Democratic Union, and its Bavaria-based sister party, the CSU.
That backing gives them the two-thirds majority of MPs needed to change the constitution. The parties said they were confident the changes would be adopted by the Bundestag this year.
